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These transactions were created by Ethereum researcher Vlad Zamfir and Anuj Das Gupta.
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Smart transactions could be reversed with “time machines.”
They invent a technological functionality, called “traveling transactions”which relativizes the immutability of transactions in Ethereum accounting. This functionality would apply to so-called “smart transactions” (smart transactions) behaving like a time machine, which goes back over transactions and is capable of making certain modifications to them. The whitepaper for this technology states that it is not capable of modifying the confirmed blocks of the on-chain accounting record. That is to say, it is a myth that these time trips break the immutability of accounting.
Anuj Das Gupta, one of the co-founders of Smart Transactions (stxn) and responsible for the “time machine”, communicated the following in an exclusive interview for a media, at a conference for developers held in Bangkok, Thailand: “we believe that this is an important solution to the tension between flexibility and immutability when it comes to blockchains.”
The developers of this technology comment that this function to reverse transactions will be most useful for users prone to human error trading on networks with cryptocurrencies.
Another area of application of the time machine, Boris Mamlyuk, is to identify malicious actors within applications that integrate the traveling transactions: “If there is malicious use of the application, we can go back and recover the blockchain rewards that someone obtained as a result of that malicious use. Therefore, it is a force multiplier. Open the utility.”
Smart transactions would be like reversible emails
According to the media, the executive director of stxn compared in the interview the immutability of the blockchain with the first era in which emails were sent, at the end of the 20th century: once a message was sent, it was impossible to cancel it. However, today it is possible to immediately unsend an email with a single button.
Smart transactions aim to do the same thing as modern reversible emails, but in the so-called Web3, according to Das Gupta. “It allows us to time travel back and forth in the transaction sequence flow, which opens up a lot more utilities, just like that cancel shipment button,” he explained.
The creators of stxn compare the irreversibility of emails, which was a design limitation, with the immutability of Bitcoin and the various networks. However, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the network that inspired the creation of other later networks, considered that the Complete immutability was the surest and most radical way to eradicate the need for trust among the participants. And it used total immutability in the Bitcoin chain not only as a technical decision of its P2P payment system on the Internet, but as one of its main properties, as the foundation stone of the Bitcoin building.
An electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof rather than trust is therefore necessary, allowing two interested parties to carry out transactions directly between themselves, without the need for a trusted third party. If transactions are computationally impossible to reverse, they will protect sellers from fraud, and any escrow mechanism can be easily implemented to protect the buyer.
Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin
Confirmed blocks are untouchable, according to stxn
According to the white paper of Smart Transactions, Its time travel system does not modify the past or confirmed transactions on the chain. “Being able to change the past must be prohibited at all costs,” they say.
Since the past represents confirmed transactions, we would have to be able to reorder confirmed blocks, which is definitely not conceptually possible and remains technically inadmissible from what we understand and how we design our time travel infrastructure.
stxn, creator of “traveling transactions”.
By time travel, the developers mean, “solely, the way time could be represented in the before-after mode (i.e., timing), and not as the temporality mode (past-present-future). ”.
Technically speaking, this means that the temporal element of intelligent transactions “should be modeled as a data structure of transitions/events, such that they are ordered in a before-after relationship.” This produces an organization by “when” each intelligent transaction exists awaiting confirmation.
In stxn they reaffirm that no transaction can travel beyond the current block, and that travelling transactions they do not break with immutability of the chain. They comment that, however, a transaction can “advance to a block that has not been confirmed, either the current one in the middle of its production or one that will come later, causing the transaction to remain in an on-chain waiting station ready for be collected.”
Since most networks import the Ethereum virtual machine and its development lines, it is possible that “time travel” functionality will be carried over to other networks. of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.