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2016 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Evaluation of Logic-Based Smart Contracts for Blockchain Systems

Authors : Florian Idelberger, Guido Governatori, Régis Riveret, Giovanni Sartor

Published in: Rule Technologies. Research, Tools, and Applications

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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.

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Footnotes
2
While encouragement is not enforcement in all meanings of the word, it is either a precursor or a part of it.
 
3
This comparison was conducted by writing the basic solidity code for the requisite modus ponens inference and then comparing the ‘gas’ cost as estimated by the official solidity compiler.
 
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Metadata
Title
Evaluation of Logic-Based Smart Contracts for Blockchain Systems
Authors
Florian Idelberger
Guido Governatori
Régis Riveret
Giovanni Sartor
Copyright Year
2016
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42019-6_11

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