Hi. I'm working on a design for a backed token along the lines of that descibed here:
https://www.ethereum.org/tokenMy question is, is it possible for an Ethereum-based contract to own and control a private key from other blockchains ? The reason for this design is to be able to capitalise a smart contract with a portfolio of assets that back the token which runs on the Ethereum blockchain.
Any tips welcome !
Comments
Have a look at btcrelay.org for an example of a cross chain interaction.
I wanted the contract to be able to spend funds from an address which it itself had created (but which was capitalised by third parties) upon the fulfilment of certain conditions.
So something like:
Factory creates Gizmos
Factory funds Gizmos
Factory calls Gizmo spend function
But all using some other coin?
This is an essential component of a mature financial system because fixed supply assets (so called "sound money") are required for long term storage of value while variable supply currencies are required for trading and price stability. However there's not much point in creating a decentralised version of such a model if you can't capitalise the tokens with an asset base. Ok I know you can use Ethers but ideally you don't really want to enforce a nasty coupling between the Ethereum meta token and its backing asset.
The potential this has is quite huge because the meta token can be allowed to inflate according to certain pre-defined conditions, including when some un-predicted growth occurs in the token's "micro-economy". The Solidity guides appear to be aware of this potential because they allude to just such a scenario, however it only mentions using Ethers as the "backing asset" which kind of defeats the purpose of enabling the creation of supra-blockchain currencies to some extent.
When you say "the private key won't be private if you put it in a contract", does that mean that a contract cannot have any private data or properties at all ? Even constants ?
So yes, while all data might not be explicitly public, all data is discoverable in order for state changes to be validated.
Homomorphic Encryption is an active research field that seeks to develop operations/mutations upon cypher text without requiring it to be unencrypted first.