Evaluation of Logic-Based Smart Contracts for Blockchain Systems
While procedural languages are commonly used to program smart contracts in blockchain systems, logic-based languages may be interesting alternatives. In this paper, we inspect what are the possible legal and technical (dis)advantages of logic-based smart
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European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy {florian.idelberger,Giovanni.Sartor}@eui.eu 2 Data61 - CSIRO - NICTA, Brisbane, Australia {guido.governatori,regis.riveret}@data61.csiro.au Abstract. While procedural languages are commonly used to program smart contracts in blockchain systems, logic-based languages may be interesting alternatives. In this paper, we inspect what are the possible legal and technical (dis)advantages of logic-based smart contracts in light of common activities featuring ordinary contracts, then we provide insights on how to use such logic-based smart contracts in combination with blockchain systems. These insights lead us to emphasize a fundamental challenge - algorithms for logic approaches have to be efficient, but they also need to be literally cheap as measured within the environment where they are deployed and according to its economic rules. We illustrate this with different algorithms from defeasible logic-based frameworks. Keywords: Smart contract Logic
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Introduction
A smart contract is a computer program that both expresses the contents of a contractual agreement and operates the implementation of that content, on the basis of triggers provided by the users or extracted from the environment. Smart contracts are currently promoted as means to leverage efficiency, security and impartiality in the execution of an agreement, thereby reducing the costs in implementing contracts and increasing trust between parties. While imperative languages, especially procedural languages, are mostly used to code smart contracts in current blockchain platforms, declarative languages for such contracts, and in particular logic-based rule languages, should also be considered to better represent and reason upon them, towards a concept that we may call declarative smart contracts, in particular the concept of logic-based smart contracts. Combinations of logic frameworks and blockchain systems may lead to smart contracts that are easier to work with for jurists and developers and have technical advantages over procedural coding of the contracts. These combinations may also lead to new opportunities for applications for these logic frameworks. c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 J.J. Alferes et al. (Eds.): RuleML 2016, LNCS 9718, pp. 167–183, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-42019-6 11
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In this paper, we investigate the utility of logic-based smart contracts and possible ways to use them in combination with blockchain systems: – to understand what legal and technical (dis)advantages logic-based smart contracts can provide w.r.t. their procedural counterparts, we structure this investigation in light of a common contract lifecycle; – to show how logic-based smart contracts can be used in combination of blockchain systems, we inspect different combinations for leveraging logicbased languages to operate smart contracts in combination with such systems. These insights will lead us to emphasize a foundational challenge to fully t
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