FREELANCEHOUSE

The decentralised digital currency concept, as well as alternative applications, such as property registers, have existed for several decades. The anonymous protocols of e-money of the 1980s and 1990s mostly depended on a cryptographic primitive known as the Chaumian Blinding. Chaumian Blinding allowed creating new currencies with a high degree of confidentiality, but their major protocols were unable to be widely spread due to their dependence on the centralised intermediary. The role of the cryptocurrency in the world is growing rapidly: the total capitalisation of the cryptocurrency market has grown more than 5 times since the early 2016, while in December 2017, it has reached 512 billion dollars. According to available information, the number of unique active users of cryptocurrency wallets amounts almost to 8 million people. In the light of the aforesaid, the most important issue is still the scope of application of cryptocurrency. In 2009, the decentralized currency was implemented for the first time by Satoshi Nakamoto; it combines well-established primitives to confirm ownership through public key cryptography and a consensus algorithm to track who owns the coins, known as “proof of work”. The idea to take the blockchain basic technology and apply it to other concepts has started long ago. In 2005, Nick Szabo proposed a concept of property rights protection with authorisation of an owner; the concept describes how “new advanced technologies of replicated databases” will allow using a blockchain-based system to maintain a register of owners of land parcels through creating a complex structure, which includes such concepts as a farmland, adverse possession and land tax. Unfortunately, back then there was no efficient replicable database system, therefore, the protocol has not been implemented in practice. However, after 2009, once the decentralised Bitcoin consensus has been developed, a number of alternative applications quickly appeared. Shortcomings of Bitcoin’s smart contracts, mainly the absence of a Turing-complete programming language, resulted in the introduction of the Ethereum blockchain, a specialised blockchain that allows writing Turing-complete smart contracts. Ethereum is going to switch to the PoS protocol in the future, but currently it still works on the PoW protocol, which affects the speed and cost of transactions in the system. The FreelanceHouse project is a decentralised online-platform based on the Ethereum blockchain, which will use a smart-contract system. Ethereum technology makes it possible to register any transactions on the basis of a distributed base of contracts of a blockchain type, without resorting to traditional legal procedures. All transactions will be transparent, controllable and safe.