[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: Nick Szabo - Scarce Objects

[iang@iang.org]

(((((( Financial Cryptography Update: Nick Szabo - Scarce Objects ))))))

                             June 26, 2005


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https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000500.html



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Nick Szabo is one of the few people who can integrate contracts into
financial cryptograpy.	His work with smart contracts echoes around the
net, and he last year he gave the keynote presentation at the Workshop
on Electronic Contracts.  In this paper he seeks to integrate scarcity
and property constructs with the object oriented model of programming.


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Scarce Objects

Scarce objects, a.k.a. conserved objects, provide a user and programmer
friendly metaphor for distributed objects interacting across trust
boundaries. (To simplify the language, I will use the present tense to
describe architectures and hypothetical software). Scarce objects also
give us the ability to translate user preferences into sophisticated
contracts, via the market translator described below. These innovations
will enable us for the first time to break through the	mental
transaction cost barrier to micropayments and a  micromarket  economy.
 
A scarce object is a software object (or one of its methods) which uses
a finite and excludable resource -- be it disk space, network
bandwidth, a costly information source such as a trade secret or a
minimally delayed stock quotes, or a wide variety of other scarce
resources used by online applications. Scarce objects constrain remote
callers to invoke methods in ways that use only certain amounts of the
resources and do not divulge the trade secrets. Furthermore, scarce
object wrappers form the basis for an online economy of scarce objects
that makes efficient use of the underlying scarce resources. 
 
Scarce objects are also a new security model. No security model to date
has been widely used for distributing objects across trust boundaries.
This is due to their obscure consequences, their origins in single-TCB
computing, or both. The security of scarce objects is much more readily
understood, since it is based on duplicating in computational objects
the essential security features of physical objects. This architecture
is "affordable" in Donald Norman's sense, since human brains are
designed to reason in much more sophisticated ways about physical
objects than about computational objects. It is thus also "affordable"
in terms of mental transaction costs, which are the main barrier to
sophisticated small-scale commerce on the Net. Finally, it will solve
for the first time denial of service attacks, at all layers above the
primitive scarce object implementation.

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html
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