



Smart Contracts
-
The original concept of a "Smart Contract" was first introduced by Nick Szabo in his paper "Smart Contract: Building blocks for digital markets", published in 1996.
-
Smart Contracts are the realization of the computational element of Blockchain technology
-
The BitCoin blockchain has a feature known as Pay to Script, which allows for simple conditional transfers of value, which is a very basic smart contract.
-
The Ethereum Blockchain incorporates smart contracts as first class citizens, ranking smart contracts as the dominant feature of that Blockchain
-
There are many other blockchains beyond Ethereum that provide platforms for smart contracts. The table on the following site is a bit out of date but it still contains a relevant and interesting summary of various smart contract blockchains/platforms around the world: smart contract summary
-
In Theory, smart contracts can be arbitrarily complex. However, in the current start-of-the-technology, smart contracts are largely constrained to simple, rule-based, if-then logic.
-
Smart contracts are still in their infancy! As Smart contracts mature, they hold the promise of reducing the overall cost of trading any and all commodities. This promise lies in the optimization brought by automating appropriate parts of the "deal cycle", where "the deal cycle" consists of search, negotiation, performance and post-performance. Optimization of any portion of this cycle will result in increased speed and accuracy of execution, lower risk, and ultimately, overall lower cost.
Example Smart Contract Code For a Kickstarter
The following is a small bit of code that shows an example smart contract. The code is written in Solidity.