Blockchains, Smart Contracts & Future Applications

Dagstuhl Seminar on Blockchains, Smart Contracts and Future Applications

In order to anticipate and address future key topics and questions related to blockchain technologies, the seminar strove to provide an interdisciplinary breeding ground. The participants focused on future applications and developments of this technology and discussed how such complex systems can thrive over a long period of time.

Motivation

While Bitcoin currently works well in practice, there are many open questions regarding the long-term perspective of blockchain technologies, for both public and private/permissioned blockchains. It is yet unclear how processes can be designed to work in predictive ways and how to embed security in the lifecycle of smart contract development and deployment. Furthermore, the distributed nature of the system needs to be considered when thinking about which groups or individuals can influence future developments. Similar to `real-world’ societies, blockchains are based on mutual recognition of conventions. Diverse academic disciplines as well as industry can and need to collaborate to advance research in blockchain and to fully understand how the technology might impact our future lives.

SBA Research’s Decentralized Systems Group and Edgar Weippl organized together with Foteini Baldimtsi (George Mason University – Fairfax, US), Stefan Katzenbeisser (University of Passau, DE) and Volkmar Lotz (SAP Labs France – Mougins, FR) the Dagstuhl Seminar on Blockchains, Smart Contracts and Future Applications which took place in April, 2018.

Further Information

• Dagstuhl Seminar Website