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> A simple (and contrived) example

What about a simple but not contrived example (or if no good simple examples exist, a complex one)? Smart contracts are neat but I'm not sure there's any real benefit, especially for banks which likely don't need to do things without trusting each other.

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I want to buy an event ticket from you, but we're strangers. So I write a contract that releases the money to you once you send the ticket, or vice versa.

The ticket would have to be on the chain and you could then see just how much TicketMaster was making and we can't have that.

Well, the good news is that you could also program event ticketing logic with a blockchain and build a TicketMaster competitor. But now we're venturing outside simple examples :)

ebay has somehow managed to support this use case for something like 20 years on the normal existing banking infrastructure

Yeah, but the idea is that you can eliminate the middleman or implement some as hoc logic that the middleman doesn't support.

Not sure why op didn't go with "$100 on the 1st of every month."

That's just "automatic bill pay" without a bank, etc.

I wanted to pick an example that is slightly more complicated than what existing banking software provides out of the box. But my point was that you can just write your own logic without relying on the bank or another third party.

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