I’m not a fan of the term “smart contracts”. For a start, it has been used by so many people for so many different things, that we should probably just ban it completely. For example, the first known reference is from 1997, when Nick Szabo used it to describe physical objects that change their behavior based on some data. More recently, the term has been used for the exact opposite: to describe computation on a blockchain which is influenced by external events such as the weather. For now let’s put both of these meanings aside.

I want to focus here on “smart contracts” in the sense of general purpose computation that takes place on a blockchain. This meaning was popularized by Ethereum, whose white paper is subtitled “A Next-Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”.