Blockchain & Smart Contracts: Basics and Perspectives for MAS

Blockchain technology (BCT) enables a common, consistent view of some shared state among agents in distributed systems. Smart contracts (SC) are an emerging computational model allowing users to deploy arbitrary computations on a blockchain-based system. Whereas BCT and SC are currently exploited mostly for financial transactions, identity management, and asset property tracking, they have the potential to positively affect the development of many research and technology areas, such as knowledge-intensive, agent-based, intelligent, and pervasive systems. In this tutorial we introduce the main notions behind BCT and SC, and try to foresee a number of possible research directions which are of potential interest for the WOA community.

Talk given at Mini School of the XIX Workshop "From Objects to Agents", Palermo, 27 June 2018.

Record on APICe: https://talks.apice.unibo.it/BlockchainWoa2018minischool