We discuss computational models and how they relate to blockchains.
Do we want Turing-completeness, or is a weaker model more suitable?
Would a dumber (not a Turing complete) language would make smart contracts smarter (easily verifiable)? We talk about total functional languages and alternatives to accounts-based model. Should we look at the blockchain as a pure data store, possibly equipped with primitives such as map/reduce or similar?
Jack Pettersson and Robert Edström (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) present on a dependantly typed functional language for smart contracts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2uwUdzVD9I
In this episode @heckerhut, @dirkjaeckel and @j32804 amongst other things discuss legal stuff in the universe of blockchains. Non of it can be considered legal advice. As an anonymous friend of mine put it: blockchain is a hot new cool thing for borderline legal shenanigans. Is it?
Some time passed after the DAO has goxed. We will need to mention it again, because it raised a lot of legal questions. What has happened since?
We also discuss crowdsales, smart contract which went bonkers (not the DAO one), reference to other podcasts touching on topics of law and regulations (see links below) and making predictions without regard to the possibility of danger involved in it. Here is a selection os links to articles and topics we have mentioned:
Sian Jones gave some regulatory update on Epicenter Bitcoin. EU regulations are not so restrictive towards fintech / virtual currency businesses? But what about crowdsales?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F-Z3rlOapk
Our guest Florian Glatz has also appeared on Epicentre defining a legal framework for DAOshttps://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/125/we tried not to repeat what was discussed on Epicentre and recommend that episode to anyone who is interested in law and decentralisation
We have also mentionned that it might be safer to use other than Turing complete languages for smart contracts, because Turing complete ones are inherently undecidable, which makes it impossible to know what a “smart contract” will do before running it.
This year EU Parliament published some stuff on virtual currencies. They are usually little bit behind the curve – while people are discussing the DAOs they are getting their heads around bitcoin. But hopefully EU people will be catching up fast.