We now see why we've added events to our definition of a business network. Events allow the business network to be almost infinitely flexible. Revel in this little bit of chaos—it might be in some sense a little less analyzable, and that's OK. The real world isn't analyzable anyway—events provide a highly efficient coordination mechanism between participants so that important change gets agreed and recorded via multi-party transactions.

Congratulations! Remember that definition of a business network?

A business network is a collection of participants and assets than undergo a life cycle described by transactions. Events occur when transactions complete.

We've realized that those couple of sentences are maybe a little more powerful than might first appear—they describe a very rich world indeed. Let's do a worked example to see these ideas at work!