Josh Stark is a lawyer and head of operations and legal at Ledger Labs, a blockchain consulting firm and development group.
In this opinion piece, Stark focuses on "smart contracts" as an alternative form of legal agreement, speculating on how they could come to impact his industry. Over the last year, the concept of a "smart contract" has received renewed attention in legal and business circles. Advancements in blockchain technology have led some to believe that smart contracts could soon offer alternatives to traditional commercial and financial agreements, with dire results for the legal and financial sectors. While this enthusiasm may be premature, the legal profession nonetheless remains mostly unaware of this important emerging technology and the long-term implications for their profession.
In this context, " smart contract " refers specifically to the use of computer code to articulate, verify and execute an agreement between parties. Whereas a typical contract is drafted using natural language, the terms of smart contracts are expressed in code, similar to a programming language like javascript or HTML.
The contract is then "executed" by a computer – given the conditions of the agreement, and a set of defined inputs, the smart contract enforces its own terms.
Readers familiar with blockchain technology will know that the term "smart contract" is often used in a more general sense to refer to any script or program that operates on a blockchain. However for the purposes of this article, we focus on the narrower meaning described above: using code in place of traditional contractual agreements between parties. Point of origin
The term "smart contract" was first popularized by computer scientist Nick Szabo in his 1997 paper "The Idea of Smart Contracts". The vending machine, he described, is the simplest form of a "smart contract" – a mechanical device designed to […]
