ABSTRACT
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. Blockchain technology can manage the performance of a contractual exchange while also providing and building trust and reputation. Blockchain’s trust protocol can enable the kind of social contracting that characterised the way exchanges were conducted before the Internet. With the combined processing power of personal computers and interconnected devices, the traditional role of third parties and intermediaries is changing. In blockchain networks, the participants on the network remain anonymous, while the ledgers are public and transparent. Research shows that the strength of any economy is based on the trust that exists in its economic transactions. Digital payments lack the trustworthiness of transactions conducted with crypto-currencies. Once the management of performance of a blockchain-based smart contract is explained and understood, it is possible to give expression to the way that blockchain manages good faith in online business exchanges.
