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Do Smart Contract Languages Need to Be Turing Complete?

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Book cover Blockchain and Applications (BLOCKCHAIN 2019)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1010 ))

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Abstract

Blockchain based systems become more and more prominent. While starting by developing (crypto)currency payment schemes, a lot of the latest development goes in the direction of executing source code directly in the peer-to-peer network blockchains are usually built on. These so called smart contracts have become popular in order to reduce the amount of necessary middle-mans involved in different processes. Despite the large amount of research already invested in the design of languages which support smart contracts, there are still a lot of problems in the existing approaches, regularly resulting in security flaws. One of these problems is the complexity of the used languages. Therefore, this paper provides an evaluation of currently deployed smart contracts with respect of the requirements of those contracts concerning computability. The finding is that most of the currently deployed smart contracts do not need Turing complete languages, but could also be implemented based on a simpler design of the underlaying language.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://vyper.readthedocs.io.

  2. 2.

    https://etherscan.io/.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Institute, University of Applied Science Ruhr West, Bottrop, Germany

    Marc Jansen, Farouk Hdhili, Ramy Gouiaa & Ziyaad Qasem

Authors
  1. Marc Jansen
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  2. Farouk Hdhili
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  3. Ramy Gouiaa
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  4. Ziyaad Qasem
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ziyaad Qasem .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. BISITE Research Group, Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Javier Prieto

  2. International Institute of Information Technology, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, India

    Ashok Kumar Das

  3. Dipartimento di Informatica - Scienza e Ingegneria , University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Stefano Ferretti

  4. Politecnico do Porto and INESC TEC , Porto, Portugal

    António Pinto

  5. BISITE Digital Innovation Hub, University of Salamanca, AIR Institute - Deep Tech Lab , Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Juan Manuel Corchado

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Jansen, M., Hdhili, F., Gouiaa, R., Qasem, Z. (2020). Do Smart Contract Languages Need to Be Turing Complete?. In: Prieto, J., Das, A., Ferretti, S., Pinto, A., Corchado, J. (eds) Blockchain and Applications. BLOCKCHAIN 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1010 . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23813-1_3

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