Foreword
by Nick Szabo
It is exciting to see my vision for smart contracts, that I conceived over 20 years ago, blossom into so many
different and creative directions. Evolution toward smart contracts would be inevitable even if the concept did not
exist. Financial companies have, since I first explored these ideas in the 1990s, already implemented what are
effectively smart contracts without using that phrase.
As much as smart phones are more functional than traditional phones, which in turn are in many ways more
functional than messages written on paper, smart contracts can be more functional than their inanimate paper-based
ancestors. Smart contracts can automate many different kinds of processes and operations, most obviously payment
and actions conditional on payment. For example, making control of collateral dependent on whether a debtor has
chosen to pay a loan on time – the fundamental logic here is automating “if-this-then-that” on a self-executing basis
with finality.
The humble vending machine is the original form of a smart contract. At its core, a vending machine is a security
mechanism: the amount in the till should be less than the cost of breaching the till. Additionally, the machinery
reflects the nature of the deal: it computes and dispenses change as well as the customer’s choice of product. Today
the most secure environments for smart contracts are the most mature public blockchains, which are designed for
trust minimization instead of trusting the often private and insecure system found resident with a central party.
Many of the smart contracts proposed or described in this paper, or elsewhere, are meant to operate between large
institutions, or between institutions and their customers. The smart contract goes beyond enterprise business
solutions – in fact my personal favorite and most exciting type of smart contract is constructed in peer-to-peer
environments, from simple natural language by individuals to operate between individuals. This movie will get
even more exciting when machine-to-machine adoption takes shape at the intersection of blockchain, artificial
intelligence and the Internet of Things.
Smart contracts involve objectively verifiable performances, or performances that can be automated such as cash
flows. As a result, financial contracts, broadly and creatively defined, present obvious opportunities. Smart
contracts can reduce the costs of people having to calculate complicated outcomes, and thereby make possible new
kinds of contracts that weren’t possible before. Contracts-for-difference, are an example where software very
rapidly and continually adjusts balances and can dispense cash flows based on frequently updated market prices.
Smart contracts — by minimizing the need to trust a counterparty, a third party, or a foreign legal system — can
also reduce counterparty risk and expand credit and other contracting opportunities through such trust-shifting
technology.
Blockchain technology appears very much to be the jet fuel necessary for smart contracts to become commonplace
in business transactions and beyond. It is a delight to be part of a community committed to fostering the tenants of
open source cooperation, privacy and security, education in technology and working for a common social good.
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zzrose2018-02-24资源很好，非常感谢分享。
qiuhanwow2018-07-25感谢分享~目前正在学习~
loveychen2018-07-04资料不错, 感谢
