> It's effectively legal because a lot of financial fraud is not pursued.
That's not what "legal" means. Just like killing people without leaving traces to find you is not "effectively legal". It may simply be not worth pursuing because of gain/effort trade off.
Scamming old people isn't a bug with the bank.
It's a bug in the system though.
No it isn't. People are meant to have free control over their money. Are advocating that banks should be required to protect people from themselves?
For example, people from different countries scamming old people out of $1000 for Prince Abu to free his millions.
That being said, I can understand why you think something being legally exploitable is something new. Just like a loophole in a contract is a loophole in a contract.
In the case of smart contracts, there is no recourse unless built in to the contract. This is by design.
All that's going to happen is people will start writing smaller, more testable, less damaging contracts. This regime is different from legal contracts because many lawyers specifically write contracts to create problems later. In this new world, good contract writers will be gods.
So if you're a good software engineer, there is potentially a huge market about to open up for you.