Most people have heard of Bitcoin. Some people might even be able to tell you that it somehow uses cryptography to securely exchange money between users but most people don't have a real sense of how it does its job. These features rely on a notion of smart property, which is a branch of smart contracts first proposed by Nick Szabo in his seminal paper, Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks.
Coinlocked embodies these concepts as a revolutionary new version of the global all time champion device for managing physical security, the humble padlock. In essence, Bitcoin provides a mechanism that allows you to not only prove that you have money in the bank but to prove which money you have in the bank. This allows us to build a magical lock that only opens for the owner of an exactly specific piece of currency. Give that magic coin to someone else and then they can open the lock and you cannot. This just scratches the surface of the capabilities implied by the smart contract mechanism.
Bitcoin is an encryption technology, it allows to securely transfer funds and ensure identities and terms for contracts.
Coinlocked came into existence during the AT&T IoT developer event held on the weekend of August 19th where it was proposed by Ean and Erik Schuessler for Ean's birthday sneak attack on AT&T. The idea is related to a group of other technologies that the brothers had been in the process of analyzing for the creation of their new HireMe.com distributed ERP and accompanying OpenMethod.org collaborative business process consensus building infrastructure. Working with teammates Leandro Silva and Ron Wilson an early software prototype was built with a combination of the ESP8266 Arduino library, BitcoinJ and pycoin as well as a commercial grade marketing site built in WordPress.
AT&T's terms of use for the hackathon stipulate that ideas presented there are effectively in the public domain, usable by AT&T or any one else for that matter. Coinlocked is committed to Kerckhoffs's principle, perhaps best phrase by mathematician Claude Shannon as "one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them". Coinlocked's implementation of smart contracts and its related software infrastructure are Open Source and we consider it our mission to build a support infrastructure for the community that takes an interest in them. We view ourselves as an agent collaborating with the community of people who want to streamline their ability to securely and confidently work together without relying on the pervasive presence of an intruding external power.
