Contract metadata as ephemeral PSET attributes #31
Description
One person I spoke with at the Brazil bootcamp told me he has been working on wallet development and is interested in the smart contract lifecycle/metadata issues in that capacity (like "how can wallets potentially recognize contracts and provide a user interface for them?").
One feature he suggested was an ephemerally-attached PSET attribute containing contract details which could be used to give wallets "hints" about what they are being asked to sign at the signing stage (e.g., contract source code? contract name? someone's signature on the contract confirming its legitimacy? description of what the signature means? a reference to a standard contracts repository of some sort? ...). If these hints could be sufficiently confirmed by a wallet in a certain context, they could then form part of a user interface in the wallet.
The metadata would then before removed before signing and would not be published to the blockchain.
This might provide a supplement to a JSON contract metadata format. In particular, it would provide a way to incorporate such data within some existing transaction workflows without relying on having wallet software or hardware implement parsers or downloaders for a completely new file format (although that should not be taken to imply that interacting with this hypothetical proposed attribute or attributes would be particularly simple or easy; the question of what UI to display and how to validate claims about the contract is still extremely challenging!).
Anyway, this is more of an architectural concept than a specific fleshed-out technical proposal.