Smart Contracts and Their Issues

Technically, as far as we are concerned, a smart contract 1 is nothing more than a piece of code that runs on a blockchain. Having code running on a blockchain means two things: Firstly, being the history of operations happening on a blockchain 2 immutable, smart contracts can be programmed to be immutable as well, in the sense that once they are issued they cannot be revoked. Secondly, all the code on the chain runs in a decentralized fashion: No one but the whole community “holds” the (virtual) machine on which such code is executed.

These two properties make smart contracts particularly appealing for use in law. Immutability means that a smart contract behaves like its traditional counterpart: The only way to make it “disappear” would be by taking down the whole blockchain on which the contract is hosted, which is infeasible. Following a comparison with