Editing Timechain (section)

== Example 3: ==

You’re working on a hot new startup that’s solving financial problems with smart contracts. Your solution is practically perfect. You have a refund protocol in place if participants try to cheat and maybe even a way to punish the cheaters - the specifics here don’t really matter. Unfortunately, you also have no clue about [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_Malleability TX malleability] so your design breaks when the output that the refund spends is mutated.

Maybe you’re holding onto the hope that developers will eventually fix Bitcoin, but major changes to Bitcoin (even [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Softfork soft forks]) are a big deal so innovation moves slowly. And on top of that alt-coins are probably never going to be completely up to date. We know alt-coins that still haven’t patched issues that were fixed in 2012 so to summarize: most smart contracts are completely fucked until the malleability problem is fixed.

But what would you say if we told you all these problems and more could be solved with a new data structure based on [http://tinyurl.com/lr5qfn3 time-lock encryption] And that this data structure could be used with Bitcoin today - requiring no additional changes - not even a [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Softfork soft fork] or [http://tinyurl.com/3fxdazr non-standard transactions] And further: that this data structure was deterministic - it’s basic behaviour could not be changed from the time it existed to the time it ended?

You would probably think we were lying, right? But you would be wrong. FOR ONE EASY PAYMENT OF … We are joking but do keep reading, we’re really not trying to sell anything here although I have a feeling certain super computing clusters are really going to appreciate this post.<span id="time-lock-encryption"></span>