Openclear: A Decentralized Clearing System
http://gitlab.metacoinproject.org/metacoin/papers/raw/master/openclear.pdfAbstract
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.
