Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies - Peter Kent, Kiana Danial - Страница 39

Smart contracts are also called self-executing contracts, blockchain contracts, or digital contracts. They’re just like traditional contracts except that they’re completely digital. Smart contracts remove the middleman between the buyer and the seller so that you can implement features like automatic payments and investment products without the need for a central authority like a bank.

A smart contract is actually a tiny computer program that’s stored and runs on a blockchain platform. Because of that, all the transactions are completely distributed, and no centralized authority is in control of the money. Also, because it’s stored on a blockchain, a smart contract is immutable. Being immutable means that after a smart contract is created, it can never be changed again; it can’t be tampered with, which is an inherited feature from blockchain technology.

However, being immutable comes with its own disadvantages. Because you can’t change anything in the smart contract, that means that if the code has any bugs, you can’t fix them either. This makes smart contract security more difficult. Some companies aim to combat this problem by auditing their smart contracts, which can be very costly.

As time goes by, users can expect better coding practices and development life cycles to combat smart contract security problems. After all, smart contracts are still a pretty young practice, with their whole life of trial and error ahead of them.