Sukrit Kalra

1. What is a smart contract?

A smart contract is a program which encodes the terms of interaction between multiple parties on a blockchain and directly controls digital assets. A smart contract is used to enable a decentralized application by validating its computation through a distributed consensus such as one present in a blockhain.


2. Bitcoin's currency is bitcoin and the one of Ethereum is ether. But why does Ethereum also need the notion of gas? Why isn't ether enough?

In ethereum, gas is used to provide a bound on the amount of computation undertaken by a transaction. Gas is decoupled from ether to ensure that the price of computation is not tied in with the price of the ether, which might make the computation extremely hard to perform once the price of ether rises and may make it easy for attackers to do denial-of-service attacks if the price of ether drops.