/biz/ - Business & Finance

>Juels is known for warning about technological threats before they emerge. In 2015, he published a research paper about so-called “criminal smart contracts,” software programs that could “facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various real-world crimes” including murder, arson, and terrorism.

>How might such a murderous program work? Imagine that the contract specifies the target and the price. A technically-savvy would-be assassin submits a few short words describing their intended approach: “piano + fifteenth floor.” News of the crime gets picked up by a local media source, and that information makes its way back to the contract via a mechanism known as an oracle. (That’s both the title of the book and a type of technology that Chainlink Labs, where Juels is chief scientist, helps make.)