Links 

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zBmqSinsbc 

Official links: https://linktr.ee/Tellor 

Summary 

Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Tellor school and in this exercise, we are going to explain what is a smart contract. So, let's go ahead and dive right in. 

So, I feel like the most effective way to get started here is just doing a simple google search of what are smart contracts and the first hit that we get is programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. A lot of technical terms there but I think it'll be helpful if we break it down using the simple language of a normal contract that we see in the real world. So, programs would be the contracts themselves between two or more people stored on a blockchain. In a normal contract it would probably be stored as a legal document either in your own dresser drawer, under a pillow and then that run that executes, so if you're in a contract with someone to pay a certain amount of money when that money is fully handed over and it's run when predetermined conditions are met, I will give you 50USD if the Sons beat the Mavericks in the playoffs. Pretty sure they will. The key distinction that we want to make here is how is this contract executing the transfer of funds in a normal contract. You'll need to rely on an objective third party to deem those predetermined conditions have been met and then execute the transfer of funds. This causes a lot of centralization risk as this third party will need to be an entity run by humans, it also adds another layer of bureaucracy to ensure the security of that third party that the contract will be executed fairly on behalf of both parties. With the advent of smart contract technology which is simply programmatic code that facilitates the execution of a contract, we are now able to streamline that engagement between the two parties and effectively cut out the need for that third objective party, aka the middleman. Now this wouldn't be a Tellor school video without tying in Tellor somehow. Let's quickly go over how Tellor utilizes smart contract technology. If you're unfamiliar, Tellor is a decentralized and permissionless oracle network wherein users can request data to be fetched by the reporters and brought on chain to be used in their own protocols. An example of a smart contract here is a reporter will need to stake their own TRB inside the smart contract to be able to report the data for the users once the TRB is locked inside of the smart contract it is now up to the program to automatically execute the slashing of that TRB and given to a successful disputer and this is just one of many smart contracts that Tellor uses to facilitate its ecosystem and all this is done with the code that is transparent in nature due to the blockchain technology it's built on. That's going to do it for this episode of Tellor school, thank you for watching I hope that you learned something and if you haven't already, make sure to click like and subscribe as it definitely helps out the good old algorithm but until next time, take care.