Nov 8 - What if we could write a legal contract in computational code? How would that change the legal system and society itself? Stephen Wolfram, the founder of Wolfram Alpha explains why smart contracts written using blockchain technology are so revolutionary.
"Normally when someone sets up a contract it's written in something that's almost English but actually it's legalese because it has to be a bit more precise than English; and it says this party is going to do this and this party is going to do that. What if we could write that contract in code? What if we could write a computational contract that isn't written in legalese but it's written in some computational language which could actually just be executed by a computer."
This idea isn't new however, says Wolfram, and goes back to the 1600s with Gottfried Leibniz wanting to turn "all legal arguments into matters of pure logic that could potentially be resolved by a machine."
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