In the past, we talked about how Bitcoin enabled users to conduct transactions that were decentralized and trustless.
A more general case of this is the execution of arbitrary computations on the blockchain, and that’s exactly what smart contracts enable us to do in Ethereum.
We’ve mentioned this before very briefly, saying that Ethereum allows the creation of decentralized apps, otherwise known as dapps.
In this section, we’ll take a look at what smart contracts are at a high level, and why we might want them.
Then, we’ll look at what we need in a framework that allows us to run smart contracts.
As we did with Bitcoin, we’ll first look at the high level features that we want to see in Ethereum — mainly the support of smart contracts — and then see how they’re implemented at a lower level.