Like many ideas in the blockchain industry, a general confusion shrouds so called ‘smart contracts’. A new technology made possible by public blockchains, smart contracts are difficult to understand because the term partly confuses the core interaction described. While a standard contract outlines the terms of a relationship (usually one enforceable by law), a smart contract enforces a relationship with cryptographic code. Put differently, smart contracts are programs that execute exactly as they are set up to by their creators.
Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller is directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, Blockchain network.
How smart contracts work
It’s worth noting that bitcoin was the first to support basic smart contracts in the sense that the network can transfer value from one person to another. The network of nodes will only validate transactions if certain conditions are met.
But, bitcoin is limited to the currency use case.
By contrast, ethereum replaces bitcoin’s more restrictive language (a scripting language of a hundred or so scripts) and replaces it with a language that allows developers to write their own programs.
Ethereum allows developers to program their own smart contracts or ‘autonomous agents’, as the ethereum white paper calls them. The language is ‘Turing-complete’, meaning it supports a broader set of computational instructions.
Smart contracts can:
Strength in number
- Extrapolating that last point, smart contracts are likely to need assistance from other smart contracts.
- When someone places a simple bet on the temperature on a hot summer day, it might trigger a sequence of contracts under the hood.
- One contract would use outside data to determine the weather and another contract could settle the bet based on the information it received from the first contract when the conditions are met.
- Running each contract requires ether transaction fees, which depend on the amount of computational power required.
Smartcontract Creation
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