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I agree that our terminology is often terrible. "Smart contract" could well have been "conditional payment" which for most purposes is clearer. Do you know abo

• 7373737373 9y ago
  Yes, in fact this is one of the most interesting websites for me now, especially when looking at general purpose distributed computing beyond blockchains. See here for a few notes of mine: https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/5 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/5
• nicksdjohnson 9y ago
  I agree "smart contract" is a poor term, but they're way more than "conditional payment" - you can do a lot of things with them that have nothing to do with paying money.
• rabbyte 9y ago
  if we're going to simplify language then call it what it is: a program. the only reason they're called contracts is because they were theorized within the context of future financial instruments, smart contract is a historical artifact for a kind of automated thing that might have one day appeared in many forms, but now we know. calling them programs would have been more immediately accessible to programmers which is clearly where the weight is shifting, contract should have been reserved for the DSL lawyers use to write programs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • cslarson 9y ago
    Yes I think this is right and we lose something when we limit to finance or legal terminology.