Smart Contracts Quotes

Everything to do with cryptocurrencies and blockchains is the domain of fast-talking conmen. If anyone tries to sell you on either, kick them in the nuts and run.

Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions

Computer programmers are highly susceptible to the just world fallacy (that their economic good fortune is the product of virtue rather than circumstance) and the fallacy of transferable expertise (that being competent in one field means they’re competent in others).

It's not about Bitcoin or Ethereum or NFT's... These things have merely shown us what's possible. But the real value is in Cryptography, Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts - these are the things with the real business implications.

The Decentralization of Finance is really good for humanity and it’s ultimately a win for each and every one of us. Because now that we can circumvent banks, exchanges and brokerage companies by using smart contracts on the blockchain… every person, every family, and every business will experience more more liberty, more freedom, more opportunities, more abundance, more power, and more wealth.

the term “smart contract” has become more mainstream since the advent of first Bitcoin and then Ethereum, it was first coined by Nick Szabo in 1996, and thus precedes the development of blockchain networks.

The Decentralization of Finance is really good for humanity. Now that we circumvent can banks, exchanges and brokerages by using smart contracts on the blockchain… every person, every family, and every business will experience more freedom, more liberty, more opportunities, more power, more abundance, and more wealth. So DeFi is a win for humanity.

A record shop must not be harder to use than BitTorrent. The legal options, iTunes, Netflix and Spotify, made it big by being more convenient than piracy,

Smart contracts on Ethereum are worse than even non-financial commercial code; as of May 2016, Ethereum contracts averaged 100 obvious bugs (so obvious a machine could spot them) per 1000 lines of code.348 (For comparison, Microsoft code averages 15 obvious bugs per 1000 lines, NASA spacecraft code around 0 per 500,000 lines.)

The Decentralization of Finance is really good for humanity and it’s ultimately a win for each and every one of us. Because now that we can circumvent banks, exchanges and brokerage companies by using smart contracts on the blockchain… every person, every family, and every business will experience more liberty, more freedom, more opportunities, more abundance, more power, and more wealth. This makes way for more opportunities around financial wellness, permaculture investing, more effective crowdfunding, better ownership and equity arrangements, and more.

Darknet markets remain the most popular Bitcoin use case after speculation and ransomware. In 2014, darknet markets were estimated to have processed more bitcoins than all legitimate payment processors put together.

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition

The traffic is heavy, the air is light; the sunshine dances off the vehicles as they flash by. Vast glass doors slide effortlessly open at her approach, and close behind her. Immediately the street noise has gone. Olivia is left in a vast marble room, at a distant desk sits a single woman; smart, efficient, and smiling.

Tomorrow's banks will be decentralized applications of software built on cryptography, blockchain technology and smart contracts. Theyll be platforms for saving, lending, investing, moving and spending that are much more equitable and sensible than they were in the 20th century and ironically it'll be more aligned to what banks were like in much earlier civilizations. So when I talk about banks being to the economy what the heart is to the human body - this is really what I'm talking about. I'm not necessarily talking about the ICBC. The ICBC or Bank of America may play an important role, but so could thousands of small local banks or small apps on a Blockchain.

Bitcoin’s cryptography is solid, but it’s a bit like putting a six inch thick steel vault door in a cardboard frame.

Hyperledger.org is a corporate open source Potemkin village of the sort IBM has long favoured: the illusion of an open project, with no “there” there.

Bitcoin itself, as an ideology fundamentally at odds with reality based on a technology that reached its limits in 2015, will keep lurching from crisis to crisis.

The darknet markets are fuelled by users who want to buy drugs without having to go to the bad part of town and talk to people from a minority, and dealers obtaining commercial quantities to sell locally

Sadly for Bitcoin, most Austrian economists aren’t fans – even as Bitcoiners remain huge fans of Austrian economics.27 You will find Austrian jargon in common use in the cryptocurrency world. Proponents of Austrian economics include the fringe economics blog Zero Hedge, which has confidently predicted two hundred of the last two recessions. Zero Hedge covers Bitcoin extensively, and Bitcoiners are fans in turn.

The A/B test showed that the text “Donate with Bitcoin” dropped revenue per visitor by 7.5%; adding the text would have lost them $140,000 over the campaign, for the sake of a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin.

smart contracts use three technologies in bitcoin. One is multisignature technology. Another is timelock: CheckLockTimeVerify and CheckSequenceVerify—mostly CheckSequenceVerify, which is relative time from the previous transaction. And finally a new invention called Hashed Timelock Contracts or HTLC, which is a way to forward a promise that can only be unlocked by a secret. These are smart contracts using bitcoin.

David Golumbia’s The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism is a short but very useful academic survey that traces just where the Bitcoin cluster of crank political and economic ideas sprang from.

People don't tend to employ me. I'm the wrong personality type. Or rather, people do tend to employ me for a short time and then they sack me. A film broker once told me, as she terminated my contract, that I have a misleading sort of face. "You're pretty", she complained. "Your features are symmetrical and there was an article in Grazia that says human beings are programmed to find those with symmetrical features more pleasing to they eye. So this isn't my fault, I was simply responding to a biological imperative. You've even teeth, so when you smile, you look...sweet, I suppose. But you're not, are you?" "I hope not," I said. "You see, there you go again. You're a smart-arse and you've no ability to filter your thoughts---" "And my thoughts are often abrasive." "Exactly." "I'll just get my brushes and sponges and leave." "If you would.

One commenter posted: “They just prefer the imaginary debt based ‘money’ their slavemasters issue via the central banks of the world.” (Max Temkin of Cards Against Humanity responded: “Yes I use it to buy groceries.

Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care.​ It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the devices and you can build an application. You don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to innovate. ​ ​Write the app, launch it on your endpoint, and bitcoin will route it, because bitcoin is a dumb network. That is the power of innovation on the internet. It’s innovation without permission. It’s innovation without central approval. It’s innovation without a broad network upgrade. And that means bitcoin is not a specific financial network. It’s not a financial network for large transactions or small transactions, fast transactions or slow transactions. It’s whatever you want to use it for, based upon what you choose to do at the endpoint.

I’d never encountered American-style ideological libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism before the Internet. When I first heard about it, I honestly thought it was a wacky Swiftian political satire that nobody could actually believe.

In short, a spiritual teacher needs to inject conflict into a disciple’s life. Without conflict, we remain at levels of immaturity and don’t grow spiritually. The conflict is likely asking us the question, “When are you going to grow up?” Jesus was consistently challenging his disciples by confronting them with their levels of immaturity. Within congregational life, there needs to be a kind of psychological contract between pastor and people that “sometimes I’m going to make you quite uncomfortable in my sermons and in my personal conversations with you.” We should not accept spiritual messages that just always make us feel good about ourselves—a feel-good gospel. That is going to keep us stuck at immature levels of self-insight. In order for congregations to grow, both numerically and spiritually, we will need to experience conflict at all levels of congregational life.

The foundational idea behind institutions is creating trust between strangers in society. We have laws and systems in place to make it possible for millions of people who don’t know each other to live in proximity to one another. However, the creators of blockchain felt these institutions were failing.

On a smart contract platform, the possibilities rapidly expand beyond what developers desiring to integrate various applications can easily handle. This leads to the adoption of standard interfaces for different types of functionality. On Ethereum, these standards are called Ethereum Request for Comments (ERC). The best known of these define different types of tokens that have similar behavior. ERC-20 is the standard for fungible tokens and defines an interface for tokens whose units are identical in utility and functionality.2 It includes behavior such as transferring units and approving operators for using a certain portion of a user's balance.

Ethereum is the second-biggest cryptocurrency in the world after Bitcoin. It’s also very different from Bitcoin in its structure and purpose. Ethereum wasn’t developed as a currency alone. Its innovation lies in opening the blockchain up to development for different applications outside currencies and finance. Developers can build software on top of Ethereum’s blockchain, and use the network’s distributed ledger to build trust for all kinds of applications. Since the Ethereum blockchain is decentralized, once a developer has built an application, it can’t be censored or taken down by any authority. That application lives as long as the Ethereum blockchain continues.

If you have programmers, they probably save their code in Git, which is the closest I can think of to a useful blockchain-like technology: it saves individual code edits as transactions in Merkle trees with tamper-evident hashes, and developers routinely copy entire Git repositories around, identifying them by hash. It’s a distributed ledger, but for computer programs rather than money.

Take the New York–based Lemonade, arguably the best funded of today’s crowdsurance startups. Via an app, Lemonade brings together small groups of policyholders who pay premiums into a central “claim pool.” Artificial intelligence does the rest. The entire experience is mobile, simple, and fast. Ninety seconds to get insured, three minutes to get a claim paid, and zero paperwork. Adding more technology to this arrangement, companies like the Swiss firm Etherisc sell “bespoke insurance products” on the Ethereum blockchain. Because smart contracts remove the need for employees, paperwork, and all the rest, all sorts of new insurance products are being created. Etherisc’s first offering is something not covered by traditional insurers: flight delays and cancellations. Individuals sign up via credit card, and if their plane is more than forty-five minutes late, they’re paid instantly, automatically, and without the need for any paperwork.

GET BEYOND THE ONE-MAN SHOW Great organizations are never one-man operations. There are 22 million licensed small businesses in America that have no employees. Forbes suggests 75 percent of all businesses operate with one person. And the average income of those companies is a sad $44,000. That’s not a business—that’s torture. That is a prison where you are both the warden and the prisoner. What makes a person start a business and then be the only person who works there? Are they committed to staying small? Or maybe an entrepreneur decides that because the talent pool is so poor, they can’t hire anyone who can do it as well as them, and they give up. My guess is the latter: Most people have just given up and said, “It’s easier if I just do it myself.” I know, because that’s what I did—and it was suicidal. Because my business was totally dependent on me and only me, I was barely able to survive, much less grow, for the first ten years. Instead I contracted another company to promote my seminars. When I hired just one person to assist me out of my home office, I thought I was so smart: Keep it small. Keep expenses low. Run a tight ship. Bigger isn’t always better. These were the things I told myself to justify not growing my business. I did this for years and even bragged about how well I was doing on my own. Then I started a second company with a partner, a consulting business that ran parallel to my seminar business. This consulting business quickly grew bigger than my first business because my partner hired people to work for us. But even then I resisted bringing other people into the company because I had this idea that I didn’t want the headaches and costs that come with managing people. My margins were monster when I had no employees, but I could never grow my revenue line without killing myself, and I have since learned that is where all my attention and effort should have gone. But with the efforts of one person and one contracted marketing company, I could expand only so much. I know that a lot of speakers and business gurus run their companies as one-man shows. Which means that while they are giving advice to others about how to grow a business, they may have never grown one themselves! Their one-man show is simply a guy or gal going out, collecting a fee, selling time and a few books. And when they are out speaking, the business terminates all activity. I started studying other people and companies that had made it big and discovered they all had lots of employees. The reality is you cannot have a great business if it’s just you. You need to add other people. If you don’t believe me, try to name one truly great business that is successful, ongoing, viable, and growing that doesn’t have many people making it happen. Good luck. Businesses are made of people, not just machines, automations, and technology. You need people around you to implement programs, to add passion to the technology, to serve customers, and ultimately to get you where you want to go. Consider the behemoth online company Amazon: It has more than 220,000 employees. Apple has more than 100,000; Microsoft has around the same number. Ernst & Young has more than 200,000 people. Apple calls the employees working in its stores “Geniuses.” Don’t you want to hire employees deserving of that title too? Think of how powerful they could make your business.

Key Points: ● Transparency - Blockchain offers significant improvements in transparency compared to existing record keeping and ledgers for many industries. ● Removal of Intermediaries – Blockchain-based systems allow for the removal of intermediaries involved in the record keeping and transfer of assets. ● Decentralization – Blockchain-based systems can run on a decentralized network of computers, reducing the risk of hacking, server downtime and loss of data. ● Trust – Blockchain-based systems increase trust between parties involved in a transaction through improved transparency and decentralized networks along with removal of third-party intermediaries in countries where trust in the intermediaries doesn’t exist. ● Security – Data entered on the blockchain is immutable, preventing against fraud through manipulating transactions and the history of data. Transactions entered on the blockchain provide a clear trail to the very start of the blockchain allowing any transaction to be easily investigated and audited. ● Wide range of uses - Almost anything of value can be recorded on the blockchain and there are many companies and industries already developing blockchain-based systems. These examples are covered later in the book. ● Easily accessible technology – Along with the wide range of uses, blockchain technology makes it easy to create applications without significant investment in infrastructure with recent innovations like the Ethereum platform. Decentralized apps, smart contracts and the Ethereum platform are covered later in the book. ● Reduced costs – Blockchain-based ledgers allow for removal of intermediaries and layers of confirmation involved in transactions. Transactions that may take multiple individual ledgers, could be settled on one shared ledger, reducing the costs of validating, confirming and auditing each transaction across multiple organizations. ● Increased transaction speed – The removal of intermediaries and settlement on distributed ledgers, allows for dramatically increased transaction speeds compared to a wide range of existing systems.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

The cycle of optimism and euphoria leading to greed, fear and capitulation, giving way to hope and building back to optimism, drives the expansion and contraction of our financial world in a market cycle of collective human emotion.

financial contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a call option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller (‘writer’) of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the strike price). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the commodity or underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed strike price, the option is ‘in the money’ - and so is the smart guy who bought it. A put option is just the opposite: the buyer has the right, but not the obligation, to sell an agreed quantity of something to the seller of the option.

10. When your foot hurts-you're probably standing on your own toe. Take responsibility for the way your buyer is or isn't behaving by setting firm, up-front contracts about what is supposed to happen next.

smart contract is a proposed tool to automate human interactions: it is a computer protocol – an algorithm – that can self-execute, self-enforce, self-verify, and self-constrain the performance of a contract.[30][31][32]  Whereas Bitcoin and its direct progeny are referred to as the “1.0” generation, as shown below, contracts, on “2.0” platforms – the next generation of cryptocurrency, are able to enforce themselves.[33] They do not have a physical enforcement arm the way legal contracts do.[34]  Rather, because they embody complex contractual relationships in computational material, they move certain defined asset(s) automatically under certain conditions. 

As an algorithm the protocol is unbiased and capable of auditing, authenticating, validating, approving, and transferring integer values along a ledger that is distributed to tens of thousands of computers (called mining machines) that are located around the world. 

Secondary markets for financial contracts let an individual who initially invested in a stock or bond sell it to another individual that would like to take it over.

Along with John and Judi, we took a big risk and started filming on the movie before we had a contract signed with MGM. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I imagined all the insurance underwriters across the world reacting to the phrase “live crocodiles.” Those two words would be enough to blow them right out of their cubicles. So we began shooting with our zoo crocodiles, but without signatures on the dotted line for the movie. A particular scene in the script--and a good example of an insurance man’s nightmare--had a crocodile trying to lunge into a boat. Only Steve’s expertise could make this happen, since the action called for Steve and me to be in the boat at the time. If the lunging crocodile happened to hook his head over the edge of the boat, he would tip us both into the water. That would be a one-way trip. “How are you going to work it?” I asked Steve. “Get the crocs accustomed to the dinghy first,” he said. “Then I’ll see if I can get them interacting with me while I’m in the boat.” First he tried Agro, one of our biggest male crocs. Agro was too wary of the boat. He’s a smart crocodile. I think he remembered back when he was captured. He didn’t want any of it. We decided to try with our friend Charlie. Charlie had been very close to ending up at a farm, his skin turned into boots, bags, and belts. He definitely had attitude. He spent a lot of his time trying to kill everything within range. Steve felt good about the possibility of Charlie having a go. Because he was filming a movie and not shooting a documentary, John had a more complex setup than usual, utilizing three thirty-five-millimeter cameras. Each one would film in staggered succession, so that the film magazine changes would never happen all at once. There would never be a time when film was not rolling. We couldn’t very well ask a crocodile to wait while a fresh mag was loaded into a camera. “You need to be careful to stay out of Charlie’s line of sight,” Steve said to me. “I want Charlie focusing only on me. If he changes focus and starts attacking you, it’s going to be too difficult for me to control the situation.” Right. Steve got no argument from me. Getting anywhere near those bone-crushing jaws was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t keen on being down on the water with a huge saltwater crocodile trying to get me. I would have to totally rely on Steve to keep me safe.

My day had forty-eight hours. It helped that I had no social life. I recall a poor fellow who asked me out during this period. I agreed to meet him for dinner. As I was getting ready, the phone rang. “We’ve got a possum that’s been hit by a car,” the county animal control office said. “Can you help?” I’ve always liked possums. Like a lot of wildlife, they are completely misunderstood. Virginia opossums are the only North American marsupials. Marsupials tend to have lower body temperatures than other animals, so possums are among the least likely of any mammal to contract rabies. In fact, they are one of the most disease-free animals I’ve dealt with. That evening, answering the call as I dressed for my big date, I didn’t think twice. I thought I could pick it up and still make dinner. But when I got the injured possum home and examined it, I realized that it had probably been hit by the car two or three days earlier, and its body teemed with maggots. There wasn’t any way I could head out for a lovely evening, not with a maggot-infested marsupial under my care. I grabbed my tweezers and began flicking off the fly larvae, one by one. The possum was cooperative, but as the maggot-picking process wore on, it became evident that I was not going to able to make dinner. I called the fellow. “Here’s the situation,” I said. “I am working on a possum that was hit by a car. There is just no way I am going to be on time. What do you want to do?” There was a long hesitation on the other end of the line. “Why don’t I come over and help?” he finally asked. Great! I could always use help. A half hour later, in he came, looking smart and smelling of cologne. His face immediately turned pale as he saw what the project entailed, and he made a halfhearted attempt to help. After a while I wasn’t sure whether I was going to be finishing up with the possum or providing medical aid for my poor date, whose face had now turned a whiter shade of green. He excused himself and headed off into the night, never to be heard from again.

A financial system running entirely on smart contract programs on a public blockchain is a big, juicy single target for hackers.

2017 has been the year of ICOs. According to Bloomberg , ICOs have raised over $1.6 billion in 2017 alone. The explosion of ICOs is a result of the ease with which Ethereum permits the creation of new coins. With little more than an idea and a white paper, you can set up an Ethereum-based ICO and raise millions of dollars, circumventing the old-school fundraising channels of venture capital or seed funding from institutional investors.

Ethereum has become the go-to place to create new ICOs for a few reasons. First, the blockchain already exists and you don’t have to code a new blockchain from scratch. Second, Ethereum has a huge mining community and the second largest market cap of any cryptocurrency, making for a strong foundation for a new project. Finally, Ethereum has a clear set of guidelines for creating new tokens called the ERC-20 protocol.

a 55% increase in transaction volume in 2017. On the average day, the Bitcoin network processes 310,000 transactions . However, the network isn’t meeting demand. On any given day, there are tens of thousands of transactions that get put on hold waiting for the network to catch up to confirm them. These transactions are on hold because Bitcoin has a limit on its block size. Only so many transactions can fit in one block, so any that don’t fit have to wait. This waiting for confirmation is Bitcoin’s scalability problem, and it’s one that must be solved before the coin will be feasible as an everyday currency.

Counterparty is a cryptocommodity that runs atop Bitcoin, and was launched in January 2014 with a similar intent as Ethereum. It has a fixed supply of 2.6 million units of its native asset, XCP, which were all created upon launch. As described on Counterparty’s website, “Counterparty enables anyone to write specific digital agreements, or programs known as Smart Contracts, and execute them on the Bitcoin blockchain.”7 Since Bitcoin allows for small amounts of data to be transmitted in transactions and stored on Bitcoin’s blockchain, it becomes the system of record for Counterparty’s more flexible functionality. Since Counterparty relies upon Bitcoin, it does not have its own mining ecosystem.

Her husband never left her side and he seemed to suffer in his way as greatly as she did, and his tender diligence was so at odds with the man he had seen swaggering about The Unicorn in his silver-laced coat and high hat. It was a revelation, and Felix wondered again at the business and meaning of marriage; of husband and wives and how they were linked by something profounder that the mere vagaries of sentimental love and hot-blooded lust. This connection, so strange and deep between them, was something he did not understand. He wondered if he would ever manage to make such a contract. He did not think he could bear to stand by and see someone he loved suffer as this woman was suffering.

So the puzzle behind proof of work is to get the block’s hash to start with a zero [0...]. Eventually, if I keep adding nonsense characters onto the end of the block, I’ll eventually get a hash that starts with a zero. Once I do, I’ve solved the problem. The little bit of nonsense characters I had to place at the end? That’s the nonce.

Proof of Work In order to slow down attackers and guarantee blockchain security, there needs to be more honest verifiers on the network than dishonest attackers. In other words, since the blockchain is based on consensus, we need a system where people are rewarded for being honest and punished for creating false transactions. We also need to slow down block creation so that the whole network has a chance to verify transactions and certify new blocks before the next block is created.

Hashing is at the core of blockchain security.

Augur

and governments to be.A traditional bank protects

Now comes a difficult-to-grasp concept: there is no such thing as a Bitcoin. Of course, there are no physical Bitcoins. You probably already knew that. However, there are also no Bitcoins on a hard drive somewhere. You can’t point to a physical object, digital file, or piece of code and say, “this is a Bitcoin.” Instead, the entire Bitcoin network is only a series of transaction records. Every transaction in the history of Bitcoin lives in the Bitcoin blockchain’s distributed ledger. If you want to prove that you have 20 Bitcoins, the only way you can do it is by pointing to the transactions where you received those 20 Bitcoins.

Ethereum’s network with its underlying blockchain went live on July 30, 2015. While much development energy had gone into creating the Ethereum software, this was the first time that miners could get involved because there was finally a blockchain for them to support. Prior to this launch, Ethereum was quite literally suspended in the ether. Now, Ethereum’s decentralization platform was open for business, serving as the hardware and software base for decentralized applications (dApps). These dApps can be thought of as complex smart contracts, and could be created by developers independent of the core Ethereum team, providing leverage to the reach of the technology.

We believe smart contracts are better thought of as conditional transactions because they refer to logic written in code that has “IF this, THEN that” conditions.

What are you going to do?” “Finish out my contract and see how it goes.” “I meant about Peck, doofus.” I laugh. “Oh, I guess I’m going to tell her how I feel, and grab her and stick her in a closet when she runs screaming in the other direction.” “Something tells me you’re worried for nothing.” I hedge. “I don’t know.” “You’re smart, dedicated, sympathetic, and you have the ability to love her unlike anyone ever has. Stop doubting yourself.” “Yes, sir.” Stop

The classic example used to demonstrate smart contracts in the form of code executing automatically is a vending machine. Unlike a person, a vending machine behaves algorithmically; the same instruction set will be followed every time in every case. When you deposit money and make a selection, the item is released. There is no possibility of the machine not feeling like complying with the contract today, or only partially complying (as long as it is not broken). A smart contract similarly cannot help but execute the prespecified code. As Lessig reminds us, “code is law” in the sense that the code will execute no matter what. This could be good or bad depending on the situation; either way, it is a new kind of situation in society that will require a heavy accommodation period if blockchain-based smart contracts are to become widespread.

Cloud-based, blockchain-based autonomous business entities running via smart contract could then electronically contract with compliance entities like governments to self-register in any jurisdictions in which they wanted to operate. Every business could be a general universal business first, and a jurisdictional business later when better decisions can be made about jurisdictions. The same could be true for individuals as general humans first, and citizens on demand later.

Investing In Gold Not everyone would associate Ethereum with investing in gold, but that is exactly one of its uses. Using a process developed by Digix, users can use tokens to buy gold on the Ethereum blockchain. How does this work? Using the Digix app, you can exchange either Ether or fiat currency (real-life money) with gold tokens. This gold is linked to the Singaporean gold vault through a complex crypto-code. Whenever the user wants, they can switch their gold tokens for actual pieces of gold without needing to go through an intermediary or paying any large fees. This also opens up the possibility of creating similar processes for all sorts of commodities.

The Internet of Things First of all, what is the Internet of Things? The Internet of Things is the link between the internet and everyday objects that allows them to send and receive digital information and data. Its potential is huge and some say it could become a multi-trillion-dollar market. One start-up called Slock.it is attempting to tap into this potential by developing an app on the Ethereum blockchain that links physical assets, such as apartments, bikes, or vans, to a smart contract that allows users to rent the item out. The application is called Ethereum Computer and could potentially eliminate fees to rent the assets of others. It is a kind of blockchain version of Airbnb and creates a much cheaper option for both affiliates and users.

Stablecoins The ground is currently being laid to set the way for a new type of currency –the stablecoin. What is the stablecoin? The stablecoin is an asset that typically features price stability. Cryptocurrency is notoriously unstable, with volatile prices that are often difficult to predict. The advantage of them is that they give the user total control over their holdings. On the other hand, the US dollar is a great example of a fiat stablecoin, as it offers low volatility and so provides a reliable unit of money to invest in both the short term and the long term. However, the US dollar doesn’t give the user any form of control, as it is monitored by the Federal Reserve Bank and is dependent on the banking network in the US for commercial use. To get a combination of the two –full user control and reduced volatility –is an exciting prospect. Maker is a company that is currently working on a project to make this happen by creating a currency known as the Dai, which is set to become a stablecoin that combines user control with price stability. Social Networks

Social Networks Censorship on social media is common, especially on forums. Some companies are working to create a type of decentralized online community that operates on an open source code. This means that it will be built on smart contracts that will eliminate censorship. Whether this is good or bad is subjective, but it serves to show the diversity of smart contracts and blockchain applications. One example of an Ethereum-based social network is Akasha. Akasha lets users publish, share, and vote for work that has been published on its platform. It aims to provide a decentralized option that gives an alternative to services such as Medium and WordPress. The system works by giving monetary incentives in the form of Ether to users to encourage engaging and rich content. Insurance

Insurance is expected to be revolutionized thanks to blockchain technology. The technology can streamline the user experience by using smart contracts that can automate policies depending on the customer’s circumstances. It means that insurance claims could be made through the blockchain without the need for talking with an intermediary. One app known as Dyanmis uses the blockchain to manage supplementary unemployment insurance. Based on peer-to-peer technology, it uses the social media network, LinkedIn, to help confirm the identity and employment status of its customers. Another such app is Inchain, which is a decentralized insurance platform that reduces the associated risks of losses of crypto-assets in the event of cyber-attacks or online hacking.

I often get asked these questions from young people who are considering going to law school: “Do you use your law degree in what you do? Has it helped you?” These are difficult questions to answer succinctly. It’s impossible for me to say that it doesn’t play into my day-to-day activities because law school and briefly practicing law rewired my brain. I’m more structured and detail-oriented than I would have been. Having gone to law school years ago still impacts my job performance every day. Plus, people tended to accord me some professional respect in my twenties in part because I had a high-value graduate degree. It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the impact it’s had. On the other hand, it’s not as if I’m editing contracts or figuring out if something is legal on a regular basis. If I were to come across a genuine legal issue I’d call a lawyer who specializes in that sort of thing or look it up online like anyone else. Legal training (and the subsequent indebtedness) would not be my first suggestion to a young person looking to do something enterprising.* I felt I had to unlearn a lot as I embarked down a very different road.

The company noticed that its customers spent a lot of money to maintain their GE equipment, but because GE didn’t offer maintenance services, the customers weren’t spending additional money with GE after purchasing the equipment. To tap into this part of the market, GE began to bundle maintenance contracts, extended warranties, and other repair-type services across all its major product lines. This new offering was wildly successful, bringing in billions of dollars in new revenue, and it all happened because someone at GE was smart enough to figure out what services customers used to complement GE products.

a blockchain is like a database; it’s a way of storing records of value and transactions.

The common theme from everyday transactions is that we trust the institutions and the centralized databases they maintain to accurately keep a record of our lives.

The Bitcoin network estimates that after 6 blocks are added on top of a block, it is impossible to change any transactions in that block as the computing power required would make it unfeasible to change.

The inverse of the First Law: make it invisible •​Remove the triggers and your exposure to the bad habit. The inverse of the Second Law: make it unattractive •​Reframe your mindset and focus on the benefits of avoiding a bad habit. The inverse of the Third Law: make it difficult •​Increase friction between yourself and the completion of bad habits. •​Use a commitment device, such as prepaying for a course. This will make canceling this good behavior undesirable since you stand to lose money if you don’t follow through. The inverse of the Fourth Law: make it unsatisfying •​Create accountability by asking friends and family to keep you on track. •​Use habit contracts to create immediate punishments for failing to do what you say you will do.

A smart contract is a secure and unstoppable computer program representing an agreement that is automatically executable and enforceable.

Reduction of bureaucracy: Smart contracts and similar rights management solutions have the potential to reduce bureaucracy and the coordination costs of business transactions

Jane Curtin was probably the most direct of the three about going in and talking to Lorne, calmly and rationally, about the parts or lack of parts she was getting on the show, although she sometimes confronted Lorne in anger. One friend described her as a smooth lake that occasionally roiled but quickly settled back down again. She was a member of a group within the show—assistant costume designer Karen Roston and associate producer Jean Doumanian were others—that one of the men called “the Smart Women.” The Smart Women would sit in the ninth-floor green room or, when she got one, in Curtin’s dressing room, sipping tea or wine and commenting wryly on the weirdness surrounding them. Curtin was so clearly the most responsible, normal cast member that for the first two contract renegotiations the players had with NBC they chose her as the representative for all of them. After discussing objectives with the cast, Curtin sat down with program executive Aaron Cohen (who would already have discussed parameters with Lorne) to present the cast’s proposals and take Cohen’s offers back to the 17th floor. One observer privy to this process believes another reason Jane was designated the cast’s representative was that she was the most suspicious of Lorne’s role in the negotiations and therefore would be likely to get them the best possible deal.

Ethereum charges a gas fee for every transaction – similar to how driving a car takes a certain amount of gas, which costs money. Imagine Ethereum as one giant computer with many applications (i.e., smart contracts). If people want to use the computer, they must pay for each unit of computation. A simple computation such as sending ether (ETH) requires minimal work to update a few account balances and thus has a relatively small gas fee. A complex computation involving minting tokens and checking various conditions across many contracts requires more gas and thus will have a higher fee. The gas fee may lead to a poor user experience, however. It forces agents to maintain an ETH balance to pay it and leads to worry about overpaying, underpaying, or the transaction not taking place at all. So initiatives are ongoing to eliminate gas fees from end users.

However, gas is a primary mechanism for preventing system attacks that generate an infinite loop of code. It is not feasible to identify malicious code of this kind before running it, a problem formally known in computer science as the halting problem. Suppose a car is on autopilot, stuck in full throttle with no driver. Gas acts as a limiting factor: the car will stop eventually when the gas tank empties. In the same way, gas fees secure the Ethereum blockchain by making such attacks cost-prohibitive. They incentivize highly efficient smart contract code since contracts that use fewer resources and reduce the probability of user failures have a much higher chance of being used and succeeding in the market.

In the context of smart contract platforms, an oracle is any data source for reporting information external to the blockchain. How can we create an oracle that can authoritatively speak about off-chain information in a trust-minimized way?

dApps are like traditional software applications except they live on a decentralized smart contract platform. The primary benefit of these applications is their permissionlessness and censorship resistance. Anyone can use them, and no single body controls them. A separate but related concept is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), which has its rules of operation encoded in smart contracts that determine who can execute what behavior or upgrade. It is common for a DAO to have some kind of governance token, which gives an owner some percentage of the vote on future outcomes.

Clauses in a smart contract can cause a transaction to fail and thereby revert all previous steps of the transaction; as a result, transactions are atomic. Atomicity is a critical feature of transactions because funds can move between many contracts (i.e., exchange hands) with the knowledge and security that if one of the conditions is not met, the contract terms reset as if the money never left the starting point.

Ethereum is in some sense a logical extension of the applications of Bitcoin because it allows for smart contracts – which are code that lives on a blockchain, can control assets and data, and define interactions between the assets, data, and network participants. The capacity for smart contracts defines Ethereum as a smart contract platform.

Ethereum and other smart contract platforms specifically gave rise to the decentralized application, or dApp. The backend components of these applications are built with interoperable, transparent smart contracts that continue to exist if the chain they live on exists. dApps allow peers to interact directly and remove the need for a company to act as a central clearing house for app interactions. It quickly became apparent that the first killer dApps would be financial ones.

minimized friction and maximized value to users. Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts, which can provide more value to a larger group of users. Anyone can simply pay the flat fee to use the contract and benefit from the innovations of DeFi.

A smart contract is code that can create and transform arbitrary data or tokens on top of the blockchain to which it belongs. Powerfully, it allows the user to trustlessly encode rules for any type of transaction and even create scarce assets with specialized functionality. Many of the clauses of traditional business agreements could be shifted to a smart contract, which not only would enumerate but also algorithmically enforce those clauses.

A critical DeFi primitive is the ability to escrow or custody funds directly in a smart contract. This is distinct from the situation in ERC-20 when operators are approved to transfer a user's balance. In that case, the user still retains custody of their funds and could transfer the balance anytime or revoke the contract's approval. When a smart contract has full custody over funds, it presents the possibility for new capabilities (and additional primitives), including: Retaining fees and disbursing incentives Facilitation of token swaps Market making of a bonding curve Collateralized loans Auctions Insurance funds

More common and useful is the ability to intentionally burn tokens as a part of the smart contract design.

We will look at two different categories of incentives: (1) staked incentives, which apply to a balance of tokens custodied in a smart contract; and (2) direct incentives, which apply to users within the system who do not have a custodied balance.

I wouldn't want this to turn into a generic Asian hodgepodge, for example. Or a brand where the Korean part is no longer core to the business. Or the branding is offensive. Remember when Abercrombie and Fitch had all those offensive Asian T-shirts a few years back? I wouldn't want that to happen." Wyatt slurped his straw. "Jessie, sometimes you really overthink it all. For a company your size, the offer is more than fair. You'll have so much money, you can go invest it somewhere and retire on a secluded beach. These guys, Rich and Tommy, they have vision! They make magic happen with any business they acquire. Their Persian Eats cookbook based on their Netflix series has held the number one spot on the bestseller list for three months. The author is this fancy Culinary Institute of the Arts instructor. Dudley something; I forget his name, some English dude. Tommy, didn't you tell me he was chomping at the bit to do a splashy Seoul Sistas cookbook?" My whole body tensed. "We already have one coming out. And did you just say a White dude would be writing a Korean Seoul Sistas cookbook?" He backtracked in the most Wyatt-like way. "I never said that exactly. And I didn't say he was White." "With a name like Dudley, he's not exactly a sista." The silence in the room was palpable. Wyatt asked, "So no deal? Any smart business leader would jump at this opportunity." My God. Was he serious? "No deal." I looked at Daniel, pleading for any lifeline he could throw me to get me out of there. He stood from his chair. "Rich, Tommy, as always, it's been a pleasure working with you these last few weeks, but my contract ends now, at five P.M. And Wyatt, I'm respectfully declining your offer of full-time employment." Wyatt's mouth formed a perfect O. "But... why?" "I have a new client to counsel. Jessie Kim. And effective immediately, we'll be declining your offer and evaluating all of our options for selling or retaining her business." I stood and pushed the chair back with my leg. "Thank you so much for finding time to meet with me, and it was great meeting you, Rich and Tommy." Shooting a death stare at Wyatt, I continued, "As a smart business leader in a new and growing category, it's best for me now to consider my options and explore alternatives.

In June, ICOs raised around $620 million—and July 1 was the start of one of the buzziest ICOs, Tezos. The project, which had also received investment from Tim Draper, was seen as a potential competitor to Ethereum, with two features that improved upon it: formal verification, a way to mathematically prove that smart contracts would behave as the developers intended, to prevent DAO attack–like situations, and built-in governance, right on the blockchain, to manage questions like whether to fork after the DAO. It would go on to raise a record $232 million.

ERC-20 tokens, which became a class of tokens that, because they were in a standardized smart contract, could be added easily by exchanges, wallets, and so forth.4

Smart Contracts What Is A Smart Contract? Complete Guide To Tech And Code That Is About To Transform The Economy-Blockchain, Web3.0, DApps, DAOs, DEFI, Crypto, IoTs, FinTech, Digital Assets Trading By Patrick Ejeke You also might be interested in my BEST SELLER, “METAVERSE” Click the links below… Grab A Free PDF Version OR Get it on Amazon © Text Copyright  Patrick Ejeke 2022 - All Rights Reserved All rights reserved. No part of this guide may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the

Table Of Contents Introduction The Problem With Contracts The Smart Solution Distinctive Properties What You Need to Know What Is A Smart Contract? Blockchain and Smart Contracts Vitalik Buterin On Smart Contracts Digital and Real-World Applications How Smart Contracts Work Smart Contracts' Historical Background A definition of Smart Contracts The promise What Do All Smart Contracts Have in Common? Elements Of Smart Contracts Characteristics of Smart Contracts Capabilities of Smart Contracts Life Cycle Of A Smart Contract Why Are Smart Contracts Important? How Do Smart Contracts Work? What Does Smart Contract Code Look Like In Practice? The Structure of a Smart Contract Interaction with Traditional Text Agreements Are Smart Contracts Enforceable? Challenges With the Widespread Adoption of Smart Contracts Non-Technical Parties: How Can They Negotiate, Draft, and Adjudicate Smart Contracts? Smart Contracts and the Reliance on “Off-chain” Resources What is the "Final" Agreement Reached by the Parties? The Automated Nature of Smart Contracts Are Smart Contracts Reversible? Smart Contract Modification and Termination The Difficulties of Integrating Specified Ambiguity Into Smart Contracts Do Smart Contracts Really Guarantee Payment? Allocation of Risk for Attacks and Failures Governing Law and Location Best Practices for Smart Contracts Types Of Smart Contracts A Technical Example of a Smart Contract Smart Contract Use-Cases Smart Contracts in Action Smart Contracts and Blockchains In the Automobile Industry Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Governments Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Business Management Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Rights Management (Tokens) Smart Contracts And Blockchains In NFTs - Gaming Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains in the Legal Industry Smart contracts and Blockchains in Real Estate Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Corporate Structures - Building DAOs Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Emerging Technology Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Insurance Companies Smart Contracts and Blockchains in Finance Smart Contracts And Blockchains In Powering DEFI Smart Contracts  and Blockchains In Healthcare Smart Contracts and Blockchains In Other Industries What Smart Contracts Can Give You How Are Smart Contracts Created? Make Your Very Own Smart Contract! Are Smart Contracts Secure?

This standardized set of smart contract instructions meant that tokens could retain a common, consistent format for both the ICO and post-ICO trading. The tokens did not need their own blockchain and mining community to maintain them. Instead, ERC20 tokens traded on top of Ethereum. They were generated by an Ethereum-validated smart contract that kept track of the issuance and exchanges by token holders. These tokens, like bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies, still needed the immutable ledger of a blockchain truth machine to maintain their provable status as non-replicable digital assets. But because of the ERC-20 solution, they didn’t need to develop their own blockchain with all the independent computing power that would require. Instead, Ethereum’s existing computing network would do the validation for them. This low-cost solution to the double-spending challenge launched a factory of ICOs as issuers found an easy way to tap a global investing community.

Legislate is a legal technology company founded in Oxford in 2020 which makes it easy for non-lawyers to safely create, manage and search lawyer-approved contracts. Legislate makes contracts machine readable using patented knowledge graph technology so that contracts can be created, managed and searched at scale. By making contracts machine readable, Legislate is enabling a new category of smart, open contracts which know what they contain and how they connect with third party systems and services such as payroll and pensions for example. Legislate is used by fast growing businesses and scale ups to create and track contract data for employment and commercial contract use cases.

Writing DApps in Solidity is not like creating a web widget in JavaScript. Rather, you should apply rigorous engineering and software development methodologies, as you would in aerospace engineering or any similarly unforgiving discipline. Once you "launch" your code, there’s little you can do to fix any problems.

Es básicamente un sistema informático con una serie determinada de reglas que las partes contractuales deben seguir para llevar el contrato a término. Cuando todas las condiciones se cumplen (firmas, documentación, etc.), la transacción tiene lugar. Cuando todas las condiciones se cumplen (firmas, documentación, etc.), la transacción tiene lugar. Todo automatizado, sin necesidad de agentes, abogados, notarios… lo que se necesita es que las partes realicen su respectivo trabajo a priori de forma correcta. En caso de que las reglas estipuladas no se cumplan, queda cancelada la operación. Y lo mejor del sistema es que una vez que se ha creado, se puede reutilizar una y otra vez para todas las transacciones inmobiliarias. Esto significa el inicio de la compra online de inmuebles. En un futuro no muy lejano el smart contract será el centro del universo de la compra venta inmobiliaria.

Spending your twenties traveling four days a week, interviewing employees, and writing detailed reports on how to cut costs will change you, as will spending years editing contracts and arguing about events that will never come to pass, or years producing Excel spreadsheets and moving deals along. After a while, regardless of your initial motivations, your lifestyle and personality will change to fit your role.

THE DEVIL TEACHES THERMODYNAMICS My second law, your second law, ordains that local order, structures in space and time, be crafted in ever-so-losing contention with proximal disorder in this neat but getting messier universe. And we, in the intricate machinery of our healthy bodies and life-support systems, in the written and televised word do declare the majesty of the zoning ordinances of this Law. But oh so smart, we think that we are not things, like weeds, or rust, or plain boulders, and so invent a reason for an eternal subsidy of our perfection, or at least perfectibility, give it the names of God or the immortal soul. And while we allow the dissipations that cannot be hid, like death, and — in literary stances — even the end of love, we make the others just plain evil: anger, lust, pride — the whole lot of pimples of the spirit. Diseases need vectors, so the old call goes out for me. But the kicker is that the struts of God's stave church, those nice seven, they're such a tense and compressed support group that when they get through you're really ready to let off some magma. Faith serves up passing certitude to weak minds, recruits for the cults, and too much of her is going to play hell with that other grand invention of yours, the social contract. Boring Prudence hangs around with conservatives, and Love, love you say! Love one, leave out the others. Love them all, none will love you. I tell you, friends, love is the greatest entropy-increasing device invented by God. Love is my law's sweet man. And for God himself, well, his oneness seems too much for natural man to love, so he comes up with Northern Irelands and Lebanons... The argument to be made is not for your run-of-the-mill degeneracy, my stereotype. No, I want us to awake, join the imperfect universe at peace with the disorder that orders. For the cold death sets in slowly, and there is time, so much time, for the stars' light to scatter off the eddies of chance, into our minds, there to build ever more perfect loves, invisible cities, our own constellation.

With crypto, we now have a debt-free engine that, combined with Web3, smart contracts, and gamification, provides a new, truly democratic, financial and regulatory regime that will dominate human engagement over the next decades.

So, if I'm not your employee until tomorrow... does that offer to go back to your place still stand?" Surprise jolted through me. He still wanted to fuck, even knowing who I was? Or because of who I was? Ugh, this was the whole problem with my notoriety; it was impossible to know who was interested in me, Hayden, and not me, Hades. So I just used men and cast them aside before feelings could get involved. Biting back a smile, I shook my head. "Sorry, that offer dissolved the second Zed outed me." I nodded to the contract. "Make smart choices, Lucas.

Bitcoin is not a smart network. Bitcoin is a dumb network. It really is a dumb network. It is a dumb transaction-processing network. It’s a dumb network for verifying a very simple scripting language. It doesn’t offer a complete range of financial services and products. It doesn’t have automation and incredible features built in. Bitcoin is simply a dumb network, and that is one of its strongest and most important features. When you design networks, when you architect network systems, one of the most fundamental choices is this: do you make a dumb network that supports smart devices, or do you make a smart network that supports dumb devices? 5.1.1. The Smart Network - Phones The phone network was a very smart network. The telephone at the end of that network was a very dumb device. If you had a pulse-dialing phone, that thing had maybe four electronic components inside it. It was basically a switch on a wire with a speaker attached to it. You could dial by flicking the hook up and down fast enough. 
The phone was a dumb device; it had no intelligence whatsoever. Everything the phone network did was in the network. Caller ID was a network feature. Call waiting was a network feature. And if you wanted to make the experience better, you had to upgrade the network but you didn’t need to upgrade the device. That was a critical design decision because, at that time, the belief was that smart networks were better because you could deliver these incredible services just by upgrading the network for everyone. There is one small disadvantage with smart networks. They have to be upgraded from the center out. And that means innovation occurs at the center, by one player, and requires permission. As a result of smart network design, innovation only happens when a feature is needed by all of the subscribers of the network, when it is compelling enough to disrupt the function of the entire network to upgrade it. 5.1.2. The Dumb Network - Internet The internet is a dumb network. It’s dumb as rocks. All it can do is move data from point A to point B. It doesn’t know what that data is. It can’t tell the difference between a Skype call and a web page. It doesn’t know if the device on the end is a desktop computer or a mobile phone, a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, or a car. It doesn’t know if that device is powerful or not. If it can do multimedia or not. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. In order to run a new application or innovate on a dumb network, all you have to do is add innovation at the edge. Because a dumb network can support smart devices, you don’t need to change anything in the network. If you push intelligence to the edge of the network, an application that only has five users can be implemented so long as those five users upgrade their devices to implement that application. The dumb network will transport their data because it doesn’t know the difference and it doesn’t care. 5.1.3. Bitcoin’s Dumb Network Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the