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Title: Openclear: A Decentralized Clearing System Post by: cryptocurrencylive on July 22, 2014, 02:34:01 PM Openclear: A Decentralized Clearing System
http://gitlab.metacoinproject.org/metacoin/papers/raw/master/openclear.pdf Abstract This paper describes a peer-to-peer automated clearing system upon a distributed ledger such as bitcoin. The proposed solution is derived from previous crypto-financial works on contracts, financial economics and games theories. The goal is to ensure a contractually delayed exchange between two or more parties. While some features of bitcoin (in this case multi-signature transactions) are useful to a distributed clearing system, update of bitcoin protocol to allow spending on a ledger entry without a complete private signature provides the main part of the solution, making the need of a third party an optional decision. We partially fixed dispute cases by implementing a randomly-elected committee in charge of clearing disputes. The last part of the solution comes from separating a signed contract from its enforcement over the network. This allow the updated protocol to enforce contracts below a certain value while providing its users a legal basis to enforce high-valued transactions. |