# kaal:claim:3125822-032

**Claim.** Parties to a smart contract must avoid asymmetric encumbrance of assets, because in an anonymous blockchain environment where assets cannot be recovered from parties further down the transaction tree, an asymmetrically bound party can unfairly exert power by triggering a dispute.

**Type.** condition  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- anonymous or pseudonymous counterparties
- assets must be bound in the smart contract

**Source quote.**

> Therefore, it is incumbent upon the parties not to enter into an asymmetric contract of bound assets, lest one party may unfairly exert power over the other by encumbering assets in a dispute.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Vlad Andrei, *Blockchain Infrastructure for Measuring Domain Specific Reputation in Autonomous Decentralized and A* (2018), 7.2.8.1 Symmetric encumbrances, page 32

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Vlad Andrei, Blockchain Infrastructure for Measuring Domain Specific Reputation in Autonomous Decentralized and A (2018). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3125822

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `d4d0bbaa3260968226186131d60e6d64a53e904d94e4295c61fd17042f1191ef` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20et%20al.%20-%202018%20-%20Blockchain%20Infrastructure%20for%20Measuring%20Domain%20Specific%20Reputation%20in%20Autonomous%20Decentralized%20and%20A.pdf

**Failure mode.** asymmetric encumbrance abuse  (family: smart-contract-rigidity)

**Topics.** systemic-risk, law-and-legal-systems

**Keywords.** symmetric-encumbrance, escrow, dispute-resolution, anonymity

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.