Blockchain temporality: Smart contract time specifiability with blocktime

Abstract

The aims of this paper are to (1) provide a conceptual context for smart contracts, (2) argue that blockchains are a next-generation technology enabling much larger-scale and more complex computing projects, and (3) posit blocktime as a new mode of conceiving time. Blockchains are the distributed ledger technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; the payments layer the Internet never had; a mechanism for updating truth states in distributed network computing through consensus trust; and overall, a new form of general computational substrate. Blocktime is the time over which a certain number of blocks will have confirmed; and this creates an alternative event trajectory in time which can be offset against human-time or other computing clocktime regimes for arbitrage or complementary purposes. The result of this effort is to show that blocktime allows the contingency of future events to be more robustly orchestrated through temporality as a selectable smart contract feature.