Orisi is an open source framework for Bitcoin smart contracts

Tutorial
Timelock
Timelock locks funds for a given period of time. This is a hello-world of smart contracts. read more

Futures
Would you like to protect your bitcoin against price fluctuations? read more

Mechanical Turk
A concept explaining how human workers can perform smart contract arbitration. read more

Other ideas?
Put them out there: post the concept on our GitHub, or e-mail us at support@orisi.org

Here’s an idea for a contract:

1. User A freezes funds required to fulfill the put/call option on a multisig address managed by the contract
2. User B buys the option, paying into the same address
3. Once the contract expires, the oracles pay out to B (if necessary) and send the rest of the funds back to A.

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How do you approach a problem of oracle communication? So far we’ve been using BitMessage as a distributed messaging system, but it proved quite cumbersome. Not wanting to merge the system with a custom p2p communication protocol, we decided to create our own protocol that’s free and open to use by everyone.

If you want to understand Orisi’s communication, you should definitely check out FastCast’s GitHub: github.com/orisi/fastcast.

For discussion, please see: http://github.com/orisi/orisi/issues Right now it’s pretty technical, but feel free to add your nontechnical questions.

We’re also in a process of migrating the old Vanilla forum into a new domain. Sorry in advance if some of the old urls don’t work yet.

There are two official twitter accounts: @orisioracles , and @kolinko .

"You can have bitcoin stand for something that isn’t just a bitcoin. […] It could mean your car. So then your car could be accounted for on a general ledger that is then – you know, can let you do electronic contracts. you could put liens against it, moving it all into the electronic age."

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn cofounder

A basic Timelock tutorial. And yes - I know that many 7-year olds could draw better :)

- Gricha (our core dev) is on 2 week holidays
- I spent the last week on heavy code refactoring ( see https://github.com/orisi/orisi for details ). Right now both the client and the server are far easier to install, use and read
- 83tb is working on new server installation instructions - we will want to run nodes on a Docker instance ( see here:https://github.com/orisi/orisi/issues/43 for details why )
- alex is working on a qt client, and on a client install that doesn’t require a virtual machine

Having wrapped up the refactoring, I’m free to get back to writing documentation and handling community / contract development. Priority number one for tomorrow - setup instructions for contract development, client & server setup, and then - a detailed description of Oracle’s functioning.

We also have a first outside developer working on a new contract.

"So I’ll start there, and imagine that there are semi-trusted ‘oracles’ that compete to be the most reliable and trustworthy verifiers of contracts. People involved in contracts choose N of them, and then require that contract conditions be validated by one or more of them before the contract pays out. Pick more than one so no single oracle can steal the contract’s funds, but less than N in case some of them go out of business or just aren’t around to validate contracts when it is time for the contract to pay out."

Gavin Andersen

We just finished the first implementation of M of N oracles as explained in Orisi Whitepaper. Such a system will allow for external inputs (like weather, prices, websites or murk workers) in smart contracts. 

The nodes’ addresses and information is listed at http://oracles.li/

The oracles right now support just one command - a “timelock”. It allows you to lock BTC funds on a multisig address for a period of time selected by you. The funds get unlocked only with both your signature, and signatures of above 51% of oracles you selected. Oracles will sign deliver their signatures once the time is up, and they have no way of running away with funds.

Here’s the Orisi documentation INSTALL.md.

You can set up your own oracle server node, or you can launch a client and perform a basic timelock transaction.

Other transaction kinds are coming soon - next week we’ll probably have transactions depending on Bitstamp’s BTCUSD price, and a generic mediation module depending on a word appearing on an url address similar to http://earlytemple.com, but distributed.

Distributed oracles and MTurk can be to traditional notary and arbitration services what Ford’s assembly line was to the hand-crafting of automobiles.

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