Blockchains, Smart Contracts and Future Applications (Dagstuhl Seminar 18152)

This report documents the Dagstuhl seminar 18152 "Blockchains, Smart Contracts & Future Applications". While Bitcoin currently works well in practice, there are many open questions regarding the long-term perspective of blockchain technologies, for both public and private/permissioned blockchains. It is yet unclear how processes can be designed to work in predictive ways and how to embed security in the lifecycle of smart contract development and deployment. Furthermore, the distributed nature of the system needs to be considered when thinking about which groups or individuals can influence future developments. Similar to \u27real-world\u27 societies, blockchains are based on mutual recognition of conventions. Diverse academic disciplines as well as industry can and need to collaborate to advance research in blockchain and to fully understand how the technology might impact our future lives