Smart Contracts
What are smart contracts?#
Smart contracts are automated digital agreements that are programmed. They are self-executing, incorruptible, and unalterable. They do not require any actions or the presence of third parties.
Two worlds of smart contracts#
We can break smart contracts and financial transactions down into two worlds:
In one world, you want to send some notion of value between one actor (or group of actors) to another actor (or a group of actors). There has to be a representation of that value, the terms and conditions behind it, and an event to trigger it. This is what we call a financial contract and best implemented with a domain-specific language. This world has nothing to do with replacing a big company or this common notion that we might have with dapps.
In the other world, you want to write programs, maybe even replace a large company, perhaps solve something smaller. Those applications consist of a triangle:
- The client - this is what runs on your computer.
- The server - this is what runs on someone's server (or multiple servers).
- The smart contract - the piece of the code that actually runs decentralized.