Being a pragmatic yet revolutionary technology, blockchain goes beyond cryptocurrencies and bitcoin. With its capabilities of creating more transparent and secure environments while saving fair amounts of money, it has reached the performance of impacting a variety of industries and sectors by changing how contracting works.
Some of the areas in which blockchain is seen to bring the most value are secure sharing of medical data, music royalties tracking, cross-border payments, real-time IoT operating systems, personal identity security, anti-money laundering tracking system, voting mechanisms, original content creation, crypto exchange and real estate processing platforms.
Blockchain + IoT = â€
We already know that blockchain is a standalone disruptive concept for every tech aficionado out there. But have you thought of combining it with IoT? It might bring some considerable improvements to the way transactions are made, including some decreasing of risks.
There is a smarter way to do smart contracts: Ricardian Contracts.
What is a smart contract? According to Investopedia, a smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The code controls the execution, and transactions are trackable and irreversible. (Investopedia)
In simple words, they allow trusted transactions between anonymous parties without the presence of any central authority.
Smart contracts are great and all that, with one minor issue â they are not legally binding, so it is pretty hard to build a legal case against an existing fraud. And here is where Ricardian Contracts step into the scene.
While Ricardian Contracts have first been introduced in 1995, they somehow managed to penetrate today’s blockchain scene, by having this unique trait of being digital documents that can be both understood by humans and machines. This means you and your lawyers should be able to read it and perfectly understand it.
According to 101 Blockchains, a Ricardian contract is a human-readable legal agreement that once agreed upon and signed by both parties, gets converted into a machine-readable contract to define the intentions of both parties. (101 Blockchains)