In 1979, the U.S. government responded to the threat that Chrysler might close its doors with a program that had almost no U.S. precedents. The policy that lay behind the program was obscure at the time and remains so. A variant of the traditional argument for the protection of infant industries...

Nick Szabo defined smart contracts as, “….a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on the other promises.” The essence of a smart contract is that it is self-executing and has a protocol to effect this, i.e. the mechanism for...