It's absolutely vital to understand these ideas. They are not particularly complicated, especially if you relate them to things you do every day! When it comes to understanding how a blockchain helps multiple counter-parties create and agree low-friction transactions related to high-value assets, we need to understand these terms, and their importance, both stand-alone and in relationship to each other.

Now, when we look at a business network, we can see that it is full of multi-party transactions governed by contracts! It's why transactions are the most important concept in a business network; they define and capture the agreed exchanges of valuable assets between different counter-parties.

Now, let's use a term you've probably heard many times when it comes to blockchains—smart contracts. They are simply a digital manifestation of these ideas. Smart contracts are a digital form of a contract—meaning that they can be easily interpreted and executed by a computer system. In reality, all computer systems that implement high- or low-consequence transactions implement contracts. But, unlike blockchains, these systems do not have a technology with a built-in vocabulary that makes the translation of these ideas into a technology platform a straightforward exercise.