> Even the most basic of financial contracts, like "I'll give you $500 now and you give me $50 a month for the next 12 months", can't be effectively encoded Th

> Even the most basic of financial contracts, like "I'll give you $500 now and you give me $50 a month for the next 12 months", can't be effectively encoded The more interesting and viable use cases are actually more complex contracts. As a simple example consider a syndicated loan, where loan payments are distributed amongst a group. A smart contract could automate that distribution. There are much more complex examples with multi-directional cashflows between multiple parties, where smart contracts could absolutely take care of the day to day execution of the contract. There seems to be some confusion over the term "contract" in this context, though. Many people tend to jump to thinking it means "anything that could possibly be written in a legal contract," but the reality is that the subset of things which could be easily automated by smart contracts is enormous, worth trillions of dollars annually, even though there's a much bigger chunk that's not currently automatable.