Creator of Ethereum Regrets for Using the Term Smart Contracts

In a recent tweet, the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin regretted adopting the popular term smart contract. Now the term smart contract has become synonymous with the distributed computing platform Ethereum.

Vitalik Buterin is a Russian-Canadian programmer and writer who is the co-founder of Ethereum. Vitalik is also a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. Ethereum is an open source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system which featured smart contract functionality. Ethereum supports the modified version of Nakamoto consensus via transaction-based state transitions. The blockchain of popular cryptocurrency is generated by Ethereum platform. In 2016, because of the collapse of The DAO project, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains. The new version became (ETH) and the original version continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC). In 2017, the value of Ethreum cryptocurrency grew over 13,000 percent.

Recently, the creator of Ethereum expressed his regret to adopt the term Smart Contract. According to Vitalik, he should have used something more boring and technical phrase like ‘persistent script’.Vitalik responded in a discussion on the concept of CryptoLaw. Twitter account CleanApp was discussing the concept of CryptoLaw and describing what they think of the governance structures, and how digital smart contracts having to deal with real-life implications. When the CleanApp uses the term Smart Contract, Vitalik Buterin chimes in to express his regret by saying he should have used more technical and boring terminology.

According to Buterin, the term Smart Contract is not boring enough to accurately describe its technical aspects and realities. Smart contract is the computer protocol which is designed to digitally facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract. These are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyers and sellers being directly written into lines of code. These contracts allow performing credible transactions without the need of third parties. These transactions are trackable, transparent, and irreversible. Smart contract was first proposed by Nick Szabo in 1994. The main goal of the smart contract is to provide the security which is superior to traditional contract law and reduce the transactional costs which are associated with the traditional contracts. The code and agreement contained therein exist across a distributed and decentralized blockchain network.

Chetna Phour

Chetna is a passionate content writer who loves to write on a variety of topics. She loves to explore different horizons and its time for cryptocurrencies now.