content: A written contract contains fundamental two things: operational terms (for ex, when condition A happens, take action B -- pay money, collect money, etc.) and logical terms (how the operations logically fit together). English language (or French, German, Spanish, etc) are terrible at containing logical and operational terms non-ambiguously.  A much better language would be computer code.  You can get all the ambiguity out.  And that eliminates 99% of the need for arbitration. A smart contract  is written in code.  It lives on a blockchain based platform like Ethereum so it's distributed (no central location; it exists everywhere), it's encrypted (that means it's totally private and invisible to the State or to criminals), and it contains automated processes -- it's like a little bot that can run all over the net and do stuff for you.  Currently smart contracts are being used to do rudimentary things like connection protocols.  But the technology is developing to do all sorts of things.  Eventually they'll replace paper contracts.  The OSG white paper is about how you can use this technology (and a few other technologies) a much freer society than  can ever exist under a political state.    There's an article on wikipedia called "Open Source Governance."  It was written a long time ago by someone with a socialist (state control) bent.  It needs to be updated because  whoever wrote it knows nothing about OSG.