 My personal definition of a smart contract is a credible commitment that's enforced in code. What a blockchain is doing is having all of these different computers, all of these different nodes, running the same code, and it needs to come to the same conclusion. Because if the computers are all saying different things, then you don't really have the blockchain network anymore. Welcome to Building Tomorrow. I'm your regular host, Paul Matzko, with me today in the studio. I'm Matthew Feeney, the director of Cata's Project on Emerging Technologies. Today we're going to be talking about smart contracts and we've brought on a special guest with some expertise in the area. I'd like to welcome Kate Sills to the show. She came on Free Thoughts a couple of months ago to talk about smart contracts as well, kind of from a different perspective. Kate, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, what you do. Sure. For the past year, I've been researching smart contracts. My background is in computer science. I'm a software developer. I just recently started at the startup of GORC. The co-founders have been working on secure smart contracts for probably about 30 years now. Congratulations. I'm so pleased to join you today and thanks so much for inviting me. I'm so excited to have you. I think I saw on your Medium Bio that you also are a Tezos Commons board member. Right, that's correct. The Tezos Commons Foundation is a nonprofit in support of the Tezos blockchain, which will be having a beta net very soon and then a main net launch after that. So that's also exciting. That's really cool. I think we might start at kind of ground zero here for our listeners who aren't incredibly familiar with smart contracts. They're probably familiar with the concept. They've heard it bandied about. But could you start us off, Kate, by explaining what a smart contract is and what's the problem it's kind of devised to solve? Sure. So I think this is a very contentious term, so I'm just going to throw that out there. But my personal definition of a smart contract is a credible commitment that's enforced in code. And I can kind of try to break that down. But I think first off, it's very important to note that a smart contract doesn't necessarily have to be on a blockchain. And in fact, smart contracts predated blockchains, you know, they come from the early 90s and they were in use even before the worldwide web started. So there was an entity called AMEX, the American Information Exchange, that allowed people to buy and sell information, kind of like consulting time. And that used to form a smart contracts. But the problem that smart contracts are really trying to solve is what legal scholar Anthony Cronman calls transactional insecurity. And this is something that goes back to Hobbes where it's, you know, people want to make a deal. But once one side has carried out their part of the deal, the other side may renege on their promise. And this is what Oliver Williamson called opportunism. So that kind of like transactional insecurity has always been a problem and it's a problem on the Internet. And so smart contracts are trying to solve that. Now, so traditional contracts, I suppose we should say traditional contracts instead of dumb contracts, dumb versus smart. Traditional contracts, this is where you would go to court, right, to enforce the contract. If someone doesn't abide by the terms of the transaction, you take them to court or threaten to take them to court to force compliance. And the idea here is that the code in the smart contract, the kind of automatic enforcement, you know, obviates that need. You don't have to do that anymore. You'll have to go to court because the contract does what the contract is going to do as long as, you know, the one party meets the terms of the transaction. I mean, am I getting that right? Is that the, is that how the smart contract functions? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that's a really important distinction because in the real world and kind of the brick and mortar world, we can't have, we can't just say, here are the rules and then people automatically follow them. That's just not how people work. You don't have to have this kind of ex post enforcement where if you break the rules, you get punished. But in code in the computer world, it's very different. You can actually just say to the computer program like here are the rules and the computer being a dumb machine will actually just follow those rules, you know, presuming that you coded everything correctly. So it's something that Lawrence classic talked about in code is laws kind of this the internet and computers in general kind of open up this whole new world for constraints on human behavior, where if you if you write something in code, it just runs exactly as you coded it, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. So so it's not kind of this ex post enforcement. It's actually enforcement just by running the code. And how is this better than what we might call traditional contracts if I wanted to enter into a contract with Paul about, you know, well, next week, I promise that I'll sell you my car or something. Why would a smart contract be preferable to what we've been used to? Sure, sure. So I think just to say first, I think there is a lot of height. I think it's not necessarily true that at this point in time smart contracts are even better than legal contracts in a lot of ways. But I think people also have an unrealistic perspective of legal contracts. Right now, the majority of the world doesn't have access to court enforcement whatsoever. It's simply too expensive. Legal scholar Jillian Hadfield has this number where I think it's under $100,000 is just not worth worth going to court. And so access to justice is a very big deal. So I think we have to, you know, make sure that we're comparing a realistic perspective of smart contracts with the realistic perspective of legal contracts. So that being said, I think there are definitely some things that smart contracts can do better. So specifically in the area of you have one stranger trying to make a transaction with another stranger across legal jurisdictions. And that's something that up until now has mostly been limited to kind of multinational firms who can afford to figure out all of the legal specificities and details that need to happen in order to actually make that transaction occur. But something as simple as like a peer to peer auction kind of like an eBay model. Traditionally, it's been very hard to do eBay has some reputation mechanisms that try to make that happen. But something like that is very, very simple to do in a smart contract. And so so I think smart contracts are in their infancy. They definitely need to be built out more. There are a number of limitations. But when it comes to kind of the new economy that emerges on the internet and that I think we're starting to see now once we have a digital cash and cryptocurrencies, we're going to need that kind of very low transaction costs, stranger to stranger transactional security that we haven't seen before. So what is the relationship between smart contracts and cryptocurrencies? At least in some of the reading, it's very common to read about Ethereum in particular. So what is Ethereum and what's its relationship to smart contracts? Sure. So again, smart contracts have been around since the early 90s. So they predate blockchains. But what blockchains were able to provide the world was a way of solving the double spend problem. So this was a way of giving the world digital cash that they could actually transact with on the internet in a way that didn't require essential authority. And so that kind of, it was like, OK, well, now we have the cash, we can send money to people. But if we're actually trying to pay someone for an item in kind of that peer to peer market, we need to have some way of ensuring that I don't send them the money and they never send me the item, that sort of thing. So what's interesting is that the kind of pseudo anonymous founder of Bitcoin was very interested in these sorts of exchanges. There's op codes. So that's kind of like the very low level commands in the Bitcoin script that are for escrow and kind of smart contracting and other kind of more complex tasks. But Bitcoin itself doesn't really support a lot of those. They're kind of put in there in anticipation of the future. And so what people were looking for in Ethereum was a way to do more complex transactions to have more clauses, more cases, and just be able to handle a lot more complexity. So that's why you would want a more turn complete language. And so from there, there's kind of been this explosion of, OK, we can do smart contracts on a blockchain and we can use cryptocurrencies as part of that transaction. Because if we were trying to use cash, then we would have to still go back to, well, how are we having US dollars on the internet? Who's actually backing that? Who's promising that there's US dollars behind that? So what cryptocurrencies allow us to do is to include some kind of payment and transactions that we know exists or not depending on a central authority for. So what I hear is, and to put this in layman's terms, the smart contract is doing two kind of essential things. First of all, it solves the problem of escrow. Like when you talk about US dollars, right now somebody has to hold those US dollars a third party such that, you know, say you're on eBay and you want to buy a widget. The widget costs however many dollars. There's someone with a widget who's willing to part for that many dollars. But the widget has to change hands non-instantaneously, has to go through the mail. And so in theory, you're supposed to get the payment and send the widget, but there's that period of uncertainty. So eBay hold or PayPal or something. They hold on to the money in escrow to make sure that both parties, you know, the person who bought the widget gets the widget and the person that sold the widget gets the money. Whether it's Ethereum or something else, that basically crypto gets rid of that need for escrow because it's there on the blockchain. You know, it's decentralized. There's no need for a centralized escrow party. And then the other bit is that self-enforcing, right? In theory, you don't have to rely on the courts to adjudicate the situation. So it's like a self-enforcing contract and it takes care of the escrow problem. Is that a fair way of kind of characterizing what's going on there? Yeah, I think so. It's definitely self-enforcing. And I think even a lot of smart contracts will include escrow. But the important thing is that no one is in charge of the escrow. It's only the smart contract. So that part is self-enforcing as well. Which is nice because, you know, then you don't have to depend on a third party to hold your money, especially if it's large amount. Right, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And I was thinking in response to what you were saying about the potential benefits of a smart contract and the fact that with traditional contracts, especially folks who don't have lots of money, who aren't large corporations, who are not middle or upper class, don't really have access to contract disputes just because of the sheer cost of hiring a lawyer, the cost of going to court. I was thinking of rental situations. Often when I read about smart contracts, I hear folks give the example of a landlord having like a lockbox on their house and, you know, they do a smart contract with a potential renter who in exchange for payment, they get access to the lockbox or access to the digital lock on the door. If they don't pay, the door locks. The door won't open. And there's this, but there's some recourse there as well. Which like currently if you have a rental dispute, it's very rare if someone doesn't pay their rent. The landlord is basically stuck with the bill for, depending on the state for up to a, you know, six months or a year. It's often not worth it for the landlord to go through the court proceedings that are required to evict a renter. It's just too expensive, too much of a bother, too much of a pain. So you have this whole area that goes actually under-litigated in a sense that, in theory, a smart contract could provide an alternative resolution. So I think that's quite intriguing. I mean, what other areas do you see the potential applications for smart contracts? Where do you see this going in the immediate future? Like the areas where you think that will benefit right now from smart contract adoption? Sure, sure. Yeah, so I think the eBay model of transactions over the internet is a really big use case simply because most of those transactions are quite small and aren't covered by your traditional contracting system. Let's see. I think some other examples. So you had mentioned rental situations. I think in the future it might be possible to actually have property title on a blockchain if the legal jurisdiction in the area agrees to that. And then from there, as long as you have a token representing the title to a property, you can use smart contracts to securely transfer those. And so there you leave out a lot of the ambiguity that today we rely on title insurance and a whole army of people to try to figure out. Whereas if you're able to show I have ownership of this token, it makes the situation a lot easier. There's still a lot of problems to be worked out there in terms of, you know, is the legal entity that's kind of issuing all these tokens have they resolved any disputes in terms of ownership before they actually issue the tokens and that sort of thing. So there's still a lot I think to resolve there. Let's see some other examples that I'm thinking of it mostly have to do with moving something that's in the real world onto the blockchain and then enforcing secure transfer of those. So, but we can also see that there might be, you know, things maybe like buying and selling event tickets, things that might actually be created that are kind of created property in a way that can be bought and sold. You know, there's there in the contracting world there's a lot of different contracts right we might have there's marriage contact contracts there's employment contracts, there's a lot of different things. But I think what smart contracts are really great at is this kind of solving the transactional insecurity problem, especially with Internet transactions. So, I suppose this might not actually be a question so much about smart contracts but about the role of the legal systems where used to in a world where smart contracts are used. So, so go going back to the example of I promise to sell Paul a car and we organize this agreement using a smart contract and then on the day of the sale the funds get transferred and the car unlocks automatically after the contract is executed. And then Paul gets into the car and it turns out that I've sold him a defective car. It's not the car that was advertised. Yeah, and the tires are flat or the brakes don't work something like that. In this world in which smart contracts are ubiquitous I suppose do we still have a court that Paul could walk into or is there something else that could potentially be used? Yeah, so I think it could be possible that we still have court enforcement of things like that. But I think something else that's really promising is the combination of smart contracts with private arbitration. So, it might be that most of the contract is simply enforced in code, but we leave open the possibility that if there is a dispute in that contract that it goes to a predetermined private arbitration agency that we've given the authority to decide certain things. So the really cool thing here is that unlike a legal contract where we're not quite sure what the court might decide at the end of it, we can limit the discretion and the authority that's given to private arbitration to say here are the possible outcomes that we want you to decide. You can only decide among these outcomes and then we'll take whatever you give us, whatever answer you give us, and then put that into the smart contract. So I think what it does is that it actually severely limits the authority that you're handing over and allows you to have more predictability in what the total outcome of the contract is going to be. So I guess one possibility would be that this dispute arises and we think, well, we both know Kate and she's smart and we both trust her. She can sort this out. That's one model. But I worry about, well, if some of these end up in court, why would a court treat these kind of agreements as anything different to an online chat, right? Like they're just looking at a piece of computer code and trying to figure out why should that be any more important or legitimate than Paul and I just trading emails about the car. I'm thinking about this after the embarrassment of various elderly senators trying to understand how Facebook works during the Cambridge Analytica hearings where we're talking about judges who are probably going to skew older, who are going to be more likely to be tech illiterate trying to suss out the whys and wherewithals of code, right? I mean, they don't even know what the blockchain is alone with how a smart contract works. So, I mean, what sounds like Kate is that this reminds me of a proposal that Alex Tabarak made in a piece for a marginal revolution towards international courts for smart contract arbitration, where he basically points out, look, there's this long history of private arbitration between private parties that's extrajudicial, that's outside of the formal state court system. I mean, he goes all the way back to like he makes a reference to Lex Mercatoria, like the medieval Middle Ages and like merchants who had like this complex arbitration system that was like court-like, but not officially part of, you know, the legal system that arguably was a lot better than the legal system of the time and proposes a Lex cryptographia. So, I mean, I suppose you could build this into a smart contract system where people say part of the smart contract is if we have a disagreement in how this, in those ambiguities, if I sold Matthew a lemon, you know, a squirrel had died in the exhaust and now the car stank and he didn't know that until he climbed in. Written into the contract is that like the court of first appeal would be this kind of, you know, would be this Lex cryptographia, would be this private arbitration system that would resolve, you know, some large percentage of these disagreements. You could probably write that into the contract itself. I mean, have you, have you heard proposals other than Tabarak's as you, you know, as people have been writing about this space, Kate? Yeah, yeah. So, so the law merchant and using that as kind of the framework for these cross jurisdictional dispute resolution frameworks has been something that I've been arguing for quite a long time. And this is actually happening in the blockchain space. So there are companies like Claros and I think Sagewise as well. And I believe there's another one called Juris that have noticed that, you know, smart contracts are going to need some kind of dispute resolution system. And they're trying to provide that. So some of those white papers are really, really fantastic works in I think law and economics and computer science. So I'm very excited about those. But I think it's a really, really good point that, you know, this idea that we don't necessarily need the courts for enforcement that we can have private arbitration. It's not a new idea. You know, private arbitration is used all the time in commercial settings. And it goes back all the way to medieval times where the merchant class wanted to be able to resolve their disputes very quickly. They didn't want to have to go to, you know, the local feudal lord or the ecclesiastical courts because those might be far away when they're traveling for business. And they probably don't even understand what the contract is about because they're not business savvy. So the law merchant allowed them to choose arbitration entities that, you know, were people that were businessmen who understood where they were coming from. And, you know, had a similar interest in trying to resolve disputes very quickly. So maybe it might take an hour versus like, you know, months or years or weeks. So I think that's a great model for the kind of thing that we need for smart contracts on the internet. If we're using smart contracts on the blockchain and we use a currency like Ethereum, there's a large amount of security that's the responsibility of the owner of those tokens, right? And what happens if I lose my key in this kind of, in this world? Right, right. So that's something that's been really widely discussed because the kind of the experimental frameworks that are out there haven't really covered this part of it. They don't really cover kind of like the user experience and user interface aspects really at all, which is unfortunate. But I think that's just a matter of how early it is. So I think there's a couple of things that could be done there. One is having, you know, better software on the front end. So allowing users to, you know, not just have to use the command line or, you know, have to store all this stuff, but figure it all out themselves, but rather having software that kind of assists them. And, you know, in that another is having third parties kind of like Coinbase, hold some of that, you know, secret information for them and manage it for them. But I think one thing that's really intriguing is the possibility of having governance for the entire blockchain. And this is something that Tezos and others have been looking into. And that governance could in the future include some of that kind of very low level blockchain specific dispute resolution, where it's not necessarily that you have a dispute in a smart contract, but that you actually need some kind of assistance on the blockchain level itself. You've lost your private keys. You know, you had in the case of property title on a blockchain, you know, you would need to be able to go to whoever had issued that property title and say, hey, I'm the rightful owner still, I just don't have the key anymore. So that's something that people are still working out. It's not, there's no intrinsic problem that makes it, you know, unsolvable or intractable. It's mostly just that people have been like, well, we really need to kind of like figure out the consensus mechanisms and the infrastructure for this world. And we can worry about the, you know, the small user interface problems later. And so I think that's kind of where we are in the building process. I mean, it's kind of a non-unique harm in the sense where like currently I'm trying to sell my car. What's the first thing you do? You go and dig around in your paperwork and hope that you kept the car title somewhere because you don't want to keep it in your car. Right. And then you're like, oh crap, last time I moved, got put in the wrong files. Now I don't know where the car title is. And like, oh, this is a pain. I have to go see where I registered it, you know, and go down to some state authority and find out, right? Like this is currently a problem with losing title, losing access, and you end up being thrown to, like, in a sense, to a third party who's holding that information for you. So just as that is solvable, so too, in theory, is this solvable? And at least potentially it could be solvable in a way that's slipperier, that has less friction to it. And it's less of a pain than going to the, you know, other registration office and hearing a board bureaucrat give you a hard time for losing your title. And then paying to have it reissued and the like. Something else I wanted to touch on, Kate, and for our listeners, this will make you sound really smart if you bring this up in a conversation about smart contracts at your next cocktail party. I'm referencing an article by Jimmy Song from Medium, The Truth About Smart Contracts. And he's very, very bearish on the potential for smart contracts. And really, I mean, he's echoing a lot of the kind of cautions that you yourself have issued here, which is like, look, there's still stuff being worked out. This is, you know, still, you know, work in progress. But he mentions in the piece, he spends a great deal of time talking about the oracle problem, which is a riff off of the oracle of Delphi, which was a real historical, like, you know, ancient Greece. And if you wanted knowledge of the future, you're supposed to go to the oracle, pay a fee and kind of like the movie 300. She was ingesting volcanic fumes or something. Yes. Yeah, not a wise old person. Right, right. Yeah. Well, and in theory, people, you know, it was really her utterings were interpreted by a body. 300 is a very loose and dramatic and titillating interpretation. Horrible movie. Yeah, yeah. It's bad for a whole bunch of reasons. There you go. Sometime we can talk about technology and movies. So the oracle problem, what is that? What is Song talking about? And I think we've kind of danced around a bit in our conversation so far, but can you flesh that out for our audience, Kate? Sure. So it comes from a certain characteristic of code that runs on a blockchain. So anything that runs on a blockchain has to be deterministic, which just means that if you put in the same inputs, you need to get the same outputs every time. So if I have a function, you can just think of it as like a mathematical function. And, you know, I put the number one in and I get two out. Then when I try that again, and I put one in again, I should also get to the next time. So it needs to be deterministic because what a blockchain is doing is having all of these different computers, all of these different nodes running the same code. And it needs to come to the same conclusion because if the computers are all saying different things, then you don't really have the blockchain network anymore. So code that runs on a blockchain needs to be deterministic. And so that means that a smart contract when it's trying to look for information, like let's say we have a bet on the outcome of an NBA game or something like that. It can't go to NBA.com and pull down the info, the score of the game. Because I think, you know, this has happened to all of us. We go to a, you know, link on a website and it turns out that the website is no longer there or, you know, something has changed that it's broken. And so we can't code that runs on a blockchain can't kind of reach out into the real world and pull in information. But so that is definitely a problem and a limitation. But there's an easy solution to that, which is to have entities that write this kind of information to the blockchain so that it's completely deterministic and the code on the blockchain can read it. And those entities are called oracles. So, so the oracle problem, and I think this is what Jimmy Song is referring to, is that, you know, you have entities that write code to the blockchain, but the blockchain is supposed to be minimizing trust. So then, you know, what are we to think of these trusted entities that are writing code or writing the results writing information to the blockchain. So I think it this, you know, is a concern, we need to make sure that whatever we're relying on for information is actually trustworthy. But I think it's, it's really a mistake and it's really a mistake in terms of thinking of what blockchains are for they're not in trying to get rid of trust entirely. It's, it's supposed to minimize trust. It's, it's a risk management, you know, you can never get the risk down to zero, but you can try to limit it and limit the authority that you're granting to other people. So there are different ways that you can try to kind of combat this problem instead of just relying on one entity, you could rely on a lot and then kind of average them or, you know, otherwise combine the answers, so that if one of them is corrupted somehow, you know, you're, you're not, you don't have a problem. There are other things that you can do. So if you think that your threat model is that someone's going to try to bribe whoever is giving this answer, then you might just have a pool of a million people and select one of them randomly and ask them, hey, can you look at nba.com and tell me the score. And then that way it's very hard to, to bribe someone ahead of time, because, you know, the attacker doesn't actually know who it's going to be. And whoever is selected is probably not very interested in the outcome of your smart contract. So that sort of model kind of solves what Jimmy Song is referring to as the oracle problem. This is a very William F. Buckley-esque, in a way, where he said, I would rather be governed by someone chosen out of the phone book than, you know, as a graduate of Harvard. I'm riffing on that. There's a sense here where it's like the wisdom of the crowd, the wisdom of the median person. But it's also, though, not necessarily wisdom of the crowds that seems to be. It's wisdom of people who are interested or motivated to be involved. So if I get in a fight with you about, I don't know who the Pope was in 1710, right? We can just whip out our phones and we'll probably go to Wikipedia, which isn't anyone we know. It's just curated by people who do care about who the Pope was in 1710. And we can be fairly, you know, we can check the logs and see editing. But it's considered fairly reliable, right? Because it's entirely built around by a community of people who care about what's going on, without caring about whether Matthew's right or Paul's right. Yeah. Well, and then here's the recourse to arbitration system. So in those, that small percentage of cases where it's actually not accurate, where Wikipedia, you know, was some malicious editor put something false on there or just got it wrong. I mean, I have to note that as a former history teacher, I would have docked someone's paper if they put in the footnotes Wikipedia, right? Yeah, it's good for both fights. It's great for Barbets. Or in the case I'm trying to imagine now that sports betting is nationally legal online, right? Or could be depending on how states rule individually. But, you know, imagine the end of a football game. NFL.com records a touchdown was caught, but then the referees decide to review it. And after, you know, a five minute delay, they reverse that call. Everyone's always got a lot on the line in that moment. But imagine if your smart contract automatically enforced when the six points went up, you know, meaning that you met the bet, right? You met the over under, and then suddenly, oh, it's reversed, but too late, the contract executed. But again, for those, that's not a super frequent happening. That's something that happens in the very small percentage of cases. Wikipedia being wrong, right? This small percentage of cases, that's the point of this private arbitration system is for dealing with that less than 1% of situations where something messes up. I thought it was interesting, Kate, when you talked about trust and smart contracts. Smart contracts is a way of minimizing trust. I think in my own head, I don't think of smart contracts as a means of eliminating trust. In an idealized world where you could make a completely trustless smart contract, I actually don't know if that's the goal. It's almost as if there are some contexts in which making certain things less ambiguous will actually allow you to build more trust on the things that need to remain ambiguous. Making some stuff ironclad means that other things can be, you can trust people more on. You don't have to kind of like spread the trust around. I was thinking here of, well, I mean, the counter argument would be what I call the pre-nup effect, you know, the pre-nup agreement for marriage. All the social science data shows that when you sign a pre-nup, the moment you sign it, you are significantly more likely to get a divorce. So ironically, making something in that marriage contract more ironclad, less ambiguous, more specific, actually decreases the amount of trust in the relationship. So sometimes making something less ambiguous can actually undermine trust, but at the same time, we sign a marriage contract as a means of building trust. So I'd like to hear a little more about that. Where do you see that balance between smart contracts as a means of decreasing the amount of trust required in a contract and smart contracts as a way of actually building trust between the participants by decreasing ambiguity? Sure, yeah. So like I said, I think there are a number of different contracts and they're all used in different situations. So, you know, in the case of a marriage, it's not like you're making a contract with a stranger, right? You hopefully have had a very long relationship with this person and you trust them. So I think, you know, definitely human psychology comes into play where, you know, you have this person that you want to spend the rest of your life with in that situation. And then all of a sudden, you're putting in terms that kind of turned into an arm's length business transaction. And so there's, you know, I think that itself is probably very disturbing to people is kind of that transition from what would be a non-transactional relationship into a transactional relationship. But I think, you know, again, what I see the use of smart contracts for is kind of not necessarily these contracts that deal with already existing relationships, but rather people who are interacting, who have no other information about the other person and are trying to do business through the internet. So I think that's really the primary use case for smart contracts is not to take a real life relationship and turned into a business transaction, but to enable business transactions that would have never have happened without a smart contract. So it's kind of similar to what economists will say about the market in general. You know, it's not that we want to, you know, have parents, you know, buying and selling things with their kids or something like that. Like, you know, we're not trying to replace human relationships. It's that the market allows us to produce welfare for people that we wouldn't otherwise care about, you know, that live on the other side of the world and we're actually enriching their lives through business transactions that wouldn't have happened without a secure marketplace and secure transactions. To use Thomas Haskell's formation, he talks about like market capitalism more generally as like a technology of an idea. It expands the circle of who is my neighbor. So it's not as much about deepening already existing relationships in your village or in your country. It's about expanding the circle of who you'll have a relationship with. Now, because of market capitalism, a merchant in Edinburgh in Scotland can have a relationship with a merchant in Bombay and have some expectation of that relationship actually, you know, binding the two together in a way that wasn't true in kind of a pre-market or as true in a pre-market era. So it's about like widening the pool rather than deepening the pool in a sense. And that's how I think I'd apply it here. What we're running out of time here, I think if I had to sum up one of the interesting themes that's run throughout would be that, Kate, you've been pointing on that there's kind of nothing new under the sun, that smart contracts are not this, you know, last couple of years' product of cryptocurrency and the blockchain that they predate it. They go back to the early 90s. The idea of independent arbitration courts are older. They go back to the Middle Ages, as Tabarak pointed out. And thus, I mean, I think that tempers our expectations here, where we say, look, these are old forms that are being enabled to be used in new ways because of new technology. And I think that's a valuable insight. So Kate, thank you for coming on. Thank you for talking about smart contracts with us. Appreciate your time. And listeners, we'll talk to you next week on Building Tomorrow. Thank you.