TAS101: Keeping Promises with Smart Contract
TAS101: Keeping Promises with Smart Contract
In the blockchain scenario, what remains still is the underlying layer of consensus mechanism, but in an applicational scenario, the specific needs are never unanimous, and this is where the smart contract come s in, which offers the capabilities of flexibility and programmability.
However, smart contract is not a new concept — back in 1996, legal scholar Nick Szabo had made his definition:
“a smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form…”[1]
You may not know it, but for long, you have been benefiting from smart contracts, including automatically paying off credit cards, flight delay insurance etc., in which smart contracts are introduced to avoid disputes.
But why is the concept of “smart contract” mentioned once again in smart contracts?
Well, let’s put it this way: smart contracts, tamper-proof, and decentralization are like brothers, they were scattered in different spaces until the debut of blockchain technology, which can organically unite them to serve an unanimous goal.
In the traditional scenarios, smart contracts depend on our trust in a centralized agent/server. But with the development of e-commerce and C2C transactions, the mutual trust between trading parties has come into the attention of all, that’s why smart contracts based on a decentralized system are called for.
01 The Smart Contract
The smart contract follows the basic principle of human development: less is more. It seeks the promotion of productivity and therefore lessen the dependence on manpower.
In traditional app development, functional upgrade plays an important part in a product’s lifetime, and we frequently receive notifications regards app updates, which guide us through the updating process. In this scenario, the R&D personnel is actually making a unilateral update.
However, dApps emerge from transactions, and considering the “let-the-code-rule” principle of the blockchain space, functional upgrades must be implemented from a systematical perspective.
02 Contract Upgrades: Equality for Everyone
The ultimate goal of TAS is to build a powerful commercial dApps platform, hence, two-way selection for both parties of a transaction must be provided by constructing a complete set of contract upgrade mechanism. The developer cannot unilaterally adjust the functions without the consent of the users through an evaluation-and-voting process.
Steps of Contract Upgrade for TASchain:
Step 1. The developer releases CONTRACT A;
Step 2. The users receive CONTRACT A;
Step 3. The developer adds upgrade info. to CONTRACT A;
Step 4. The users receive CONTRACT B (CONTRACT A with appended contract upgrade info)
Step 5. The users decide to update the current contract, canceling the reception of CONTRACT A in favor of CONTRACT B;
03 TASchain: The Responsibilities of a Public Chain
The smart contract mechanism of TAS not only emphasizes the coordination of the developer and the users in upgrading plan, but also aims at the quick fixes and solutions for severe problems that should occur in the operations of dApps by means of platform-level support.
For this purpose, TAS as a platform will provide a complete set of interface and tool chain to assist the functional upgrades of operating dApps.
And in this process, the “let-the-code-rule” principle will always be the first priority.
Finally, for a large-scale dApp, multiple subsidiary smart contracts are called for to complete the sophisticated business logic. Hence, TAS provides for dApps a complete solution regarding cross-contract communication, dependence relationships and app packaging.
That’s all for the TAS101 on smart contract, see you next time.
[1] Nick Szabo, Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets (1996), http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature /LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/smart_contracts_2.html.
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