The Rise of Smart Contract and Its Complex Impacts on the Digital Ecosystem

Abstract

Nowadays, we are forced to join in a more and more complicated contract and a faster and faster transaction in the market. We are also seriously faced with security problems. As the society evolves, the related systems generally become complicated. The economic system, more specifically, the market system is not exempted from this law. This exactly means the advent of a new formula of it currently corresponding to the extent of complications. Without any incessant improvement of the digital technologies, our performance would not be smoothly achieved.

Given an idea of smart contract, blockchain becomes a broader computational technology to realize a set of smarter systems/transactions associated with the Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT). Such a well-known instance is the smart contracts on the Ethereum platform, that is associated with account information each. The smart contract tied together with DLT actually enables to design an economically well-behaved set of Peer to Peer (P2P) system, which ranges over from the micro market to the international currency transaction system. The introduction of this technology may suggest what a truly decentralized future is. This must cast a new light on the problem how to design either auction or vote of P2P, i.e., without auctioneer or chairperson. Either of them will possibly mean the change of existing social consensus.

The DLT originally was designed by the presumption that someone always is malicious, as Byzantine Generals Problem suggests. The programming of smart contract is written in Turing complete language. A smarter solution against a complicated system actually then requires a stronger security against their vulnerabilities. Thus, the diffusion of blockchain technologies into the contract systems will demand a fully protective infrastructure. As Stephen Wolfram suggests, furthermore, “[a]s the number of DLTs grows, it becomes harder and harder to learn and build ecosystem tools to make monitoring transactions, smart contracts and services possible.” In other words, the diffusion of blockchain will bring newly some coordination problems as well as the new statistical examinations.

In this paper, after looking briefly the current features of digital contract, we will argue some evolutionary impacts on the digital ecosystem in the context of either smart contracts on the Ethereum platform or the Byzantine Generals Problem.