Why smart contracts?

You have now seen a smart contract in action. So what is all the fuss about? What can smart contracts do that traditional programs (normal web applications) can't? When it comes to changing the value of a variable in a program that lives on the network, we can use remote procedure call. More commonly, we can store a variable in a database and people can change the value in the database from a web application. When sending money, we can integrate our web application with Stripe or PayPal, giving us the means to send money. Alternatively, you could create a table in a database for storing digital money. Ether in Ethereum is basically digital money. In fact, a normal web application can do everything a smart contract can do, but faster and cheaper. The key difference is that blockchain solutions can be trustless. This means that you can put trust in the...