#密码资产动态追踪 Before diving into Web3, you must understand these blockchain fundamentals

Following market fluctuations is important, but more crucial is supplementing your professional knowledge. I’ve decided to organize a straightforward guide: what exactly are smart contracts and oracles, and what’s the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
**What is a smart contract?**
Simply put, it is a piece of code that executes automatically, completely on its own, without the need for third-party intervention like banks or lawyers. It sounds amazing, but in reality, it’s the main reason behind the split between Bitcoin and Ethereum.
In fact, Bitcoin also has contract functions, but the problem is that they are not Turing complete — meaning they cannot execute certain programming commands. From the beginning, Bitcoin’s developers aimed to make it store value only.
Ethereum, on the other hand, is not just a tool for storing value but a platform for running decentralized contracts. This difference determines the entire environmental direction of both blockchains.
**But here’s the problem**
The blockchain itself is a closed system and cannot read information from the outside world directly. Do you want to replace real-world contracts with smart contracts? That’s impossible — because contracts need data from the real world as triggers. So what do you do? This is where the "oracle" or "information mediator" problem arises.
An oracle acts as an intermediary for information, providing data from outside the chain to the contracts on the chain. But you have to trust this mediator, which brings us back to the problem of needing a third party. This is the core issue that Web3 is still trying to solve.
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