Fair Exchange: Theory and Practice of Digital Belongings

Fair Exchange is the first comprehensive work on the discipline of fair exchange. More and more of our lives are spent interacting digitally across fields such as payments, certified delivery, e-commerce and legal relations, and the importance of fair exchange is therefore growing rapidly. From the historic to recent cutting-edge developments within fair exchange, this book is accessible to researchers, postgraduates, industry and practitioners, as well as developers building the future of the digital economy.Part 1 presents a comprehensive framework for understanding fair exchange protocols and the categories of items that can be exchanged. It dissects fair exchange into its five essential operations, examining different execution environments before explaining the properties of fair exchange protocols that emerge from these environments.Part 2 presents examines fair exchange protocols from the perspective of this framework, while Part 3 covers a number of topics of special importance for fair exchange, including legal issues that can emerge in practical applications of fair exchange, and a risk analysis against the expectations of the participants. This is followed by a discussion of the operational risks present in attestable-based protocols and how to guard against them. We conclude with an overview of potential commercial applications of fair exchange and future avenues for scientific research.