What are smart contracts? Why should we care? How can they improve our future life and why do we need to get to know them?
A smart contract is technically a digital contract designed to solve the problem of trust between two parties.
A set of lines of code indissolubly linked to the blockchain with characteristics comparable to those of a real contract.
The smart contract eliminates the third party that acts as guarantor within a transaction and thanks to the technology it allows actions to be carried out upon the occurrence of one or more conditions envisaged within the smart contract itself.
Smart contracts are distributed on the Blockchain and are immutable over time. Once deploied (i.e. written and integrated with the blockchain) it cannot be modified, nor can smart contracts be created that have a temporary duration
The fields of application and uses that can be made of smart contracts are very wide.
For example, they range from banking, postal and insurance, sharing of movable or immovable property. Any situation that requires a contract could be the protagonist of a smart contract. But be careful, being unmodifiable, they lend themselves specifically to being a source of scams or malicious backdoors.
Ethereum is currently the preferred Blockchain for creating smart contracts using the proprietary solidity language.