Earlier this year, we made you freaks aware of the hard work a company named Suredbits has been putting in to bring Discreet Log Contracts to bitcoiners by developing a functional implementation. Well, it seems like we may have our first ever DLC on the bitcoin mainnet! Nicolas Dorier, a man who has made it his life's mission to make BitPay obsolete, has made a bet via a DLC with Christopher Stewart, the founder of Suredbits. The bet is over who will win the Presidential Election here in the US.

Some may claim the following statement is an exaggeration, but I would kindly tell them that they are wrong. We are witnessing a very important moment in Bitcoin history, freaks. A working implementation of DLCs in the wild is MASSIVE in my honest humble opinion. Many have knocked Bitcoin's shortcomings as they pertain to the ability to create and execute smart contracts using the protocol. Well, now it is becoming clear that this particular criticism is going to be harder to sling at Bitcoiners moving forward. One can even make the case that DLCs are the best way to implement smart contracts at the moment due to the fact that they are much more scalable due to the fact that they don't take up that much scarce block space to execute and are much more private than any other competing smart contract implementations on the market.

DLCs may be the least appreciated "killer application" of Bitcoin out there right now. It will be very interesting to see the types of applications that begin to proliferate as more people come around to this type of smart contract.

For those who need a refresher, DLCs allow two or more parties to enter into a smart contract agreement regarding a future event. In the case of Nicolas and Chris, they are betting about the outcome of the US Election this year. However, they could have bet on the price of bitcoin on the same date, the outcome of an NBA game later this week, or the temperature in Boise next Wednesday at noon local time. The two construct multiple transactions that decide where the funds are sent; in this case there is a transaction that sends the funds to Chris and another that sends them to Nicolas depending on the outcome of the election. The movement of funds within the DLC is dependent on a signature from an Oracle that confirms the outcome of the event once it happens. The Oracle has no idea who is using their signature to execute DLCs unless users publicly state that they are. This allows individuals to make bets in private and for anyone who is so inclined to use a particular Oracle's signature. One signature for millions of bets is possible. Making DLCs scalable to the masses.

Soon there will be wallet software available to anyone who wants to construct DLCs that makes their construction trivial. To learn more about this, I recommend you listen to the episode of Tales from the Crypt I dropped this afternoon with Ben Carman from Suredbits. We dive into DLCs, how they are under-appreciated, and how they will shift the narrative of smart contracts back to Bitcoin in a big way.

Slowly but surely, Bitcoin's keep it simple stupid/slow and steady development approach is paying off in big ways.

Final thought...

Nothing like a fire on the beach to wrap up Labor Day Weekend.