Nicholas Dorier, who happens to be a developer at BTCPay has made a bet via a DLC or Discreet Log Contract with Christopher Stewart, the Founder of Suredbits with Outcome Observer acting as a third-party oracle. Considering the fact that 2020 has been an extremely political year, the bet is over who will win the Presidential Election here in the US.
While as to who is going to clinch the victory title is still up to the voters, this was, however, an interesting development for the Bitcoin community. And with this, the Bitcoin network had its first-ever discreet log contract [DLC)] on 8th September.
Once the election is finalized, the Outcome Observer will broadcast a signature that both Dorier and Steward can use to settle the bet. If Trump wins the election, Dorier will receive 1 BTC. But if Biden wins, Stewart will receive 1 BTC.
This was first revealed by well-known Podcaster, Marty Bent, in a recent blog post, who asserted that DLCs are the “best way to implement smart contracts at the moment” primarily due to the scalability and privacy factor, than any other competing smart contract implementations on the market. He further went on to add that,
“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.”
A quick primer: DLC technology essentially facilitates conditional payments on bitcoin and compatible blockchains. According to MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative’s post, by creating a DLC, two parties are able to form a monetary contract redistributing their funds to each other, based on preset conditions, without revealing any details of those conditions to the blockchain. It further reads,
“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.”