Applications
While far from an exhaustive list, the following examples provide some insight into the general idea and class of applications that BlockCAT targets.
Safe Remote Purchases and Escrows
If you wish to buy from a stranger online, you are required to trust that stranger honors their agreement in sending the goods. Similarly, the seller must trust the buyer is honest about receiving the goods. With smart contracts, the system becomes trustless as both parties must uphold their agreement to receive the goods or funds. With BlockCAT, anybody can set up these contracts on a per-use-basis without needing to write a single line of code, opening up the world of trustless online purchasing and other forms of escrows without the need for centralized systems.
Tamper Resistant Polls and Voting
Traditional online polling systems have weak trust and are vulnerable to attack due to their centralized nature. Polls as smart contracts can provide strong and transparent voting systems that operate completely autonomously. Decentralizing the entire process guarantees that miscounts of ballots are impossible. Additionally, the immutable and open nature of the blockchain means that anybody can audit the process and verify the results independently. BlockCAT ensures that this process is painless to setup and eliminates the need to manually program each poll, transforming the lengthy and tedious process into just a few clicks on our platform.
Auctions
Online auctions are vulnerable to many methods of user manipulation. Both bidders and sellers can fail to uphold their promise to pay or deliver goods once the auction has ended. Malicious users or bots can place fictitious bids to artificially inflate prices, and throw the bidding process into disarray. Centralized auction services can fail to resolve user conflicts and freeze funds for large amounts of time. BlockCAT will prevent these problems through decentralized smart contracts, ensuring all parties involved must conduct the auction in a fair and transparent way.
Proof of Existence
Typically, in order to certify ownership or existence of an item or idea, a centralized party must serve as an authoritative source of truth that others must trust. Using smart contracts, this ownership data can be written permanently into the blockchain, where it remains extremely resistant to malicious change or accidental data loss. BlockCAT makes it easy for anyone to perform proof of existence, by providing externally verifiable procedures for anybody to confirm the block-chain data is valid.
Crowdfunding
Platforms such as Kickstarter or IndieGoGo are popular places to provide the initial funds for large scale projects. However, the project creators have little to no accountability to actually create and deliver their proposed project. BlockCAT will provide smart contract based crowdfunding that guarantee accountability on the creators. This additional trust throughout the whole crowdfunding system will therefore encourage more money to be invested into projects. Additionally, BlockCAT will provide payment platform integrations so funders not holding digital currencies can effortlessly contribute.
Prediction Market Integration
Prediction markets, such as Augur and Gnosis provide an easy way to access external information not typically available to smart contracts, such as the results of elections. BlockCAT can leverage this information to provide simple ways of automating transactions that occur according to the results of this information.
Bitcointalk
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1971103.0
Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/BlockCATio/
Website
https://blockcat.io/
Roadmap
https://medium.com/@BlockCAT/blockcats-road-to-beta-8626c16f5915
