Tension Rising at Facebook Libra
The regulatory pushback on Facebook’s digital currency project Libra appears to be putting the frighteners on some of its commercial partners, with several companies currently considering their positions, according to the FT.
How Do Ethereum Smart Contracts Work?
Agoric’s plans for smart contracts that span multiple blockchains
If you think smart contracts began with Etherum or even Nick Szabo think again. Dean Tribble, founder and CTO of Agoric, claims they go all the way back to 1989, when Tribble, Mark Miller, now chief scientist at Agoric and others were working on at the American Information Exchange (AmiX) an online resources marketplace on which complex contractual relationships were programmed.
“To us, a smart contract has always been, a contract-like arrangement expressed in code, where the behaviour of the programme enforces the terms of the contract. We were doing that way before blockchains came along, although we didn’t call them smart contracts then,” said Tribble. Those early programmatic deals ran on standard clients and servers, but blockchains have changed the game, he added. “What blockchains do is they give us places to run code that have very high integrity.”