During this week’s Smart Contracts Symposium in NYC, 250 attendees—including members of the blockchain-trading group the Chamber of Digital Commerce—listened as the potential benefits of the technology were laid out, from securing property titles, to gold ownership.

Symposium speakers, presenters, and panelists demonstrated and debated all of the possible use cases for smart contracts—as well as all of the possible kinks that need to be worked out (especially before they can be applied by fintechs or other financial services) including compliance and privacy issues.

Smart contracts were brought into vogue due to their link to the Ethereum technology, but the concept—self-executing code (normally linked to distributed ledger technology) to complete an “if this, then that” action—has been around since the mid-nineties when cryptographer Nick Szabo wrote “Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets.”

Szabo, who fittingly delivered the symposium’s keynote, described smart contracts as such in his forward to the Smart Contracts Alliance whitepaper:

The humble vending machine is the original form of a smart contract. At its core, a vending machine is a security mechanism: the amount in the till should be less than the cost of breaching the till. Additionally, the machinery reflects the nature of the deal: it computes and dispenses change as well as the customer’s choice of product.

Since Szabo’s seminal paper was published over twenty years ago, there have been some major strides forward in the technology, like the smart contract language Ivy, developed primarily for property management use cases, that blockchain technology startup Chain demoed for the first time at the symposium.

However, smart contracts have also suffered setbacks—the attack on the DAO, held on Ethereum, is one of the most cited examples by those who are not yet as enthused by the technology, who often claim “smart contracts are not smart, nor are they contracts.”

From a legal or a regulatory standpoint, as members of the symposium’s “Code is Law?” panel did, code may execute an action, but that doesn’t make it a legally binding contract, and definitely doesn’t mean the enforced action is legal (re. the DAO).

But if blockchain is a fledgling technology, then smart contracts are in the embryonic stage, and its potential is certainly high—as further outlined by the whitepaper prepared for the symposium, which the curious can view here.