Smart Contract
A Smart Contract is a Computer Program that is a digital protocol embedded in blockchain technology that automatically executes, controls, or documents legally relevant events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Law, Smart Legal Contract, Contract, Vending Machines, Blockchain, Ethereum, Smart Contract Chatbot Assistant.
References
2023a
- (GM-RKB ChatGPT, 2023) ⇒ Summarize the concept Smart Contract in 1- 2 paragraphs, promt.GM-RKB ChatGPT (model: gpt-4-1106-preview) Retrieved: 2023-12-24.
- QUOTE: A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement directly written into code. Smart contracts run on a blockchain network, which provides a decentralized platform that is tamper-proof and transparent, allowing the contract to be executed automatically when predefined conditions are met, without the need for intermediaries. They can facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, making transactions and agreements more secure, efficient, and less costly by cutting out middlemen like notaries, lawyers, or banks.
Smart contracts can be applied to a variety of fields, including financial services, supply chain management, real estate, and more. They make it possible to execute complex scenarios, such as multi-signature accounts, escrow services, and automated access control. The use of blockchain technology ensures trustworthiness and reliability because records of the contracts are immutable, meaning they cannot be altered after the fact, and they are distributed across multiple nodes on the network, which prevents fraud and downtime.
- QUOTE: A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement directly written into code. Smart contracts run on a blockchain network, which provides a decentralized platform that is tamper-proof and transparent, allowing the contract to be executed automatically when predefined conditions are met, without the need for intermediaries. They can facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, making transactions and agreements more secure, efficient, and less costly by cutting out middlemen like notaries, lawyers, or banks.
2023b
- (Wikipedia, 2023) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract Retrieved:2023-8-21.
- A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT applications. Vending machines are mentioned as the oldest piece of technology equivalent to smart contract implementation. The original Ethereum white paper by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 describes the Bitcoin protocol as a weak version of the smart contract concept as originally defined by Nick Szabo, and proposed a stronger version based on the Solidity language, which is Turing complete. Since Bitcoin,various cryptocurrencies have supported programming languages which allow for more advanced smart contracts between untrusted parties.
A smart contract should not be confused with a smart legal contract, which refers to a traditional, natural-language, legally-binding agreement that has selected terms expressed and implemented in machine-readable code.
- A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the reduction of need for trusted intermediators, arbitration costs, and fraud losses, as well as the reduction of malicious and accidental exceptions. Smart contracts are commonly associated with cryptocurrencies, and the smart contracts introduced by Ethereum are generally considered a fundamental building block for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFT applications. Vending machines are mentioned as the oldest piece of technology equivalent to smart contract implementation. The original Ethereum white paper by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 describes the Bitcoin protocol as a weak version of the smart contract concept as originally defined by Nick Szabo, and proposed a stronger version based on the Solidity language, which is Turing complete. Since Bitcoin,various cryptocurrencies have supported programming languages which allow for more advanced smart contracts between untrusted parties.
2019
- (Tateishi et al., 2019) ⇒ Takaaki Tateishi, Sachiko Yoshihama, Naoto Sato, and Shin Saito. (2019). “Automatic Smart Contract Generation Using Controlled Natural Language and Template.” In: IBM Journal of Research and Development, 63(2/3). doi:10.1147/JRD.2019.2900643
- QUOTE: ... Smart contracts are computer programs that run on blockchain platforms and execute a variety of commercial agreements such as financial contracts and purchase agreements. From the engineering perspective, the terms and conditions of each legal contract are equivalent to the software requirements that the program should satisfy. Therefore, engineers who work on a smart contract must understand the contents of the contract and communicate with a business person to elicit and clearly define the software requirements. This task is often error-prone and requires much effort to verify the requirements. There have been many studies on formal models of legal contracts [1] for the sake of verifying the semantic aspect of such contracts. However, it is still difficult to guarantee that the formal models accurately represent the contracts, as the formal models are difficult for business persons or attorneys to understand. In order to mitigate the efforts and the risks of smart contract development, we propose a method for automatically generating smart contracts from legal contract documents. ...