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Topic: Tontines without Trust (Read 153 times)

newbie
Activity: 5
Merit: 8
December 05, 2017, 03:12:22 PM
#1
Let's say Alice and Bob want to run a Tontine contract. Every alternating day either Alice or Bob is required to send 1 BTC into the Tontine public address. After Alice sends 1 BTC, Bob has 144 blocks (24 hours at 1 block every 10 minutes) to send his payment.

Then vice versa, and so on until one misses their deposit. Let's say its Bob. After 144 blocks of non-payment, the Tontine pays Alice the reward: the entire sum of payments made over the lifetime of the contract. Is there anyway to do this with Bitcoin's existing protocol (assume no new OpCodes or primitives added to the underlying protocol)?

Unlike other types of smart contracts, Alice and Bob specifically don't want the contract to unwind. E.g. cross-chain atomic swaps rely on TimedHashLocks. If one party doesn't pay up their obligations, then the timed lock expires and the other party gets their funds back. But in a Tontine, we specifically want to avoid this issue. Otherwise once Bob goes broke, he could just bail and get his payments back.
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