@thebiologist1117
Normally, a contract is an agreement between two or more parties that is executed on mutually agreed conditions which are decided beforehand.
It could either be a verbal contract or a written contract, both being legal, but one a bit easily enforceable.
In the context of a blockchain, a little program is written with the "mutually agreed conditions which are decided beforehand", and is stored on the blockchain. Upon these conditions being met, the contract is automatically executed by the program.
A bit of programming:
simple if/else statements are used to check the fulfillment of the conditions of the contract.
Benefits:
-Makes life easy by automating a lot of the processes
-Quick and efficient
-Transparency
Demerits:
-Could be Technical for some
-too much dependency on tech (could fail)
-people's trust issues with blockchain-related stuff
-tech could get compromised/"hacked": the usual problem with computers
I got some stuff from here:
https://www.ibm.com/topics/smart-contracts
IBM is a leader in adopting blockchain. In the above link they talk about an example of how the transportation of vaccines from the manufacturing site to the last-mile delivery, and how the entire process is automated using blockchain.
Hope I said it fine! 🤭
