New Thriller From Cornell's Ari Juels Imagines Weaponizing Blockchain

In this edition of the Bloomberg Crypto newsletter, Olga Kharif wonders whether smart contracts might be out to get us.

Terrorist financing. Money laundering. Ransomware. Murder for hire. Like any financial instument or technology, cryptocurrency and blockchain are not immune to being used for harm.

A new fictional thriller, written by a Cornell Tech computer science professor, puts a fanciful spin on this reality. There are FBI agents, an assassination, kidnapping, and looted ancient artifacts alongside explanations of key blockchain features like smart contracts, flash loans, and coin mixers. All this, with a smattering of Greek mythology and history—a function of writer Ari Juels’ background in literature and mathematics.

The book, dubbed “The Oracle”, features a software-developer protagonist who still wears T-shirts bought by his ex-wife 20 years ago. He’s got no social life to speak of—and he’s the target of assassins who’ll be paid via the execution of a smart contract if the hit is successful.

Which all begs the question: could this fictional premise become startling reality?

Juels is known for warning about technological threats before they emerge. In 2015, he published a research paper about so-called “criminal smart contracts,” software programs that could “facilitate leakage of confidential information, theft of cryptographic keys, and various real-world crimes” including murder, arson, and terrorism.

How might such a murderous program work? Imagine that the contract specifies the target and the price. A technically-savvy would-be assassin submits a few short words describing their intended approach: “piano + fifteenth floor.” News of the crime gets picked up by a local media source, and that information makes its way back to the contract via a mechanism known as an oracle. (That’s both the title of the book and a type of technology that Chainlink Labs, where Juels is chief scientist, helps make.)

This seemed unsettlingly plausible enough that I had to ask Juels whether something like this was actually possible. His response wasn’t entirely reassuring, because according to Juels while the the technology to create the exact smart contract described in the book hasn’t been created yet, it will be here in a few years.

“This cautionary tale wasn’t my intention when I first started writing the book, but when ChatGPT dropped, suddenly the landscape changed,” Juels told me. “So the book is a cautionary tale: People need to be cautious now about how AI tools get added to blockchains.”

Juels said he hopes that by the time such a smart contract becomes possible, the appropriate safeguards have already been put into place to neutralize it.

Nothing to worry about, then.

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