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Smart Contracts

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Abstract

There is a buzz of excitement surrounding smart contracts, with considerable speculation about the role they will play in changing the face of e-commerce. To back this up, there has been significant investment in smart contract technology from small organisations as well as much larger consortia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The programming language for Ethereum is called Solidity and is classified in computer science terms as ‘object oriented’. In other object-oriented programming languages, the common terminology is ‘class’, instead of contract.

  2. 2.

    Test this for yourself by looking at the code written by one of the funders of Ethereum at https://etherscan.io/address/0x972a2da1f9d1dc0b01d313e52ffe916bb5e9a2c1#contracts.

  3. 3.

    See https://slock.it.

  4. 4.

    OTC contracts are privately negotiated and traded, meaning that the parties decide their terms without going through an exchange (or other intermediary). Financial products, such as swaps, forward rate agreements, exotic option and so on, are almost always traded in this way.

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Correspondence to Maria Grazia Vigliotti .

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Vigliotti, M.G., Jones, H. (2020). Smart Contracts. In: The Executive Guide to Blockchain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21107-3_8

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