[Cryptography] Proposal of a fair contract signing protocol

Allen allenpmd at gmail.com
Mon Jun 13 19:29:16 EDT 2016


>
> With block chains, we can effectively get the possible cheating to 0.  For
> example, we can sign a contract and enter it's hash into the block chain,
> and in the contract state that it is valid only if recorded in the block
> chain with both party's signatures.  It is like having a free escrow agent.
>

I don't see how this solves the problem of one party signing and then the
other party holding their signature until a time of their choosing.  That
would however be easily solved by placing an expiration time in the
contract and declaring that the contract is only valid if entered into the
blockchain before then.  However, depending on the properties of the
blockchain and the message containing the contract, a related problem might
be how does the first party know that the contract is in the blockchain?
The second party could post the contract to the blockchain and not reveal
it is there until they are ready to enforce it; meanwhile the first party
has no way to enforce the contract if they cannot locate it in the
blockchain.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20160613/1637e0c2/attachment.html>


More information about the cryptography mailing list