Discreet Log Contracts
Invisible smart contracts on the bitcoin blockchain
Discreet log contracts are an exciting new technology that facilitates conditional payments on bitcoin and compatible blockchains
By creating a Discreet Log Contract, two parties can form a monetary contract redistributing their funds to each other, based on preset conditions, without revealing any details of those conditions to the blockchain. Its appearance on the blockchain will be no different than an ordinary multi signature output. Therefore the contract is discreet in the sense that no external observer can learn its existence or details from the public ledger.
If you want to learn more about what this technology is, how it works, and how you can use it, you can either read the paper or read this blog post detailing its applications.
If you want to get started leveraging this technology, you can do so in a couple of ways:
Creating an oracle
If you have an interesting data feed that might be useful for people to use in their contracts, consider making an oracle out of it. We created a library for that exact purpose. Check out one of the tutorials available. We created one for Go, NodeJS and .NET Core
Essentially, you pre-commit to publishing the data feed’s value at a particular time in the future by publishing the public key, and you publish the values and signatures once the publication is due.
Right now, the publication could just be on a plain website. We are still working on a standardized publication mechanism. If a standard is decided we will add this to the library.
Executing Discreet Log Contracts
You can execute Discreet Log Contracts using lit, the Lightning Network implementation that the DCI is working on.
You can find a tutorial on setting up an environment consisting of two lit nodes and a Bitcoin Regtest here.
Here is a tutorial on executing a Discreet Log Contract from lit’s console client (lit-af).
We also have a RPC Client for LIT in Go, NodeJS and .NET Core that you can use to execute Discreet Log Contracts from your own software. Samples on how to do that are also available in Go, NodeJS or .NET Core.
Contact us
If you have any ideas, suggestions, questions, feel free to contact us via dlc@mit.edu