Ricardian contract

The Ricardian contract (or Riccy), as invented by Ian Grigg in 1996, is a method of recording a document as a contract at law, and linking it securely to other systems, such as accounting, for the contract as an issuance of value. It is robust through use of identification by cryptographic hash function, transparent through use of readable text for legal prose and efficient through markup language to extract essential information.

A Ricardian contract places the defining elements of a legal agreement in a format that can be expressed and executed in software.

The method arises out of the work of Ian Grigg completed in the mid-1990s in contributions to Ricardo, a system of assets transfers that was built in 1995-1996 by Systemics and included the pattern.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.