The History of Smart Contracts

Smart contracts were used to settle foreign exchange swaps as early as the 1980s. Counterparties would agree terms of a swap with contractual calculations written into a spreadsheet stamped with a hash. The hashed spreadsheet file was saved on a floppy disk and given to a lawyer to be held for safekeeping. On a crypto family tree, that puts Shirdi not far removed from Bitcoin. Three of eight papers cited by Satoshi in 2008 were authored by Haber and Stroneta.