That may be, but if so, it might be worse. What's worse, not getting a lot of uptake for this idea that's been hard going for others, or getting the uptake because of trade-offs you made that make it a ticking time-bomb that may damage the reputation of the idea for years to come and set it back?

Solidity is like PHP in the 90's, easy to learn and easy to screw up. Though Solidity just compiles to the EVM, and there is no reason new, safer languages can't be built on top.

As far as I can remember, the EVM has never failed, just programmers.

That comparison may be apt. PHP at that time was a mix of some good ideas (ease of deployment) with some horrible ones (register globals on by default is unexcusable), and some poor planning. We all lived with the fallout of that for a very long time.

The register globals issue could have been avoided at very little cost, if any cost at all, to the popularity and spread of the language and many millions of dollars and much personal information would have been saved.

I disagree, Solidity is really not easy to learn. It is easy to screw up, though.

You've wet my appetite. Got a link to your book?

Pedantry: you mean whet, not wet. To "whet" means to excite, stimulate.

Literally, to sharpen, as in "whetstone".

This should save anyone else a few clicks: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073CPP581

Check out his profile.

Thanks. Glad I checked the profile.

I don't think your personal attacks lie within the standards set by this community. There are many ways of disagreeing, even vigorously, without being a jackass. It's discrediting to yourself.

You appear to have misconstrued my words. I don't in any way think this is a good idea; just one that has the viral characteristics of "worse is better".

I spent about three thousand words on the smart contracts chapter, attempting to conclusively stab this bad idea in the face and supply a suitable rhetorical ammo dump for anyone faced with having to deal with these things to kill the idea stone dead. Absolutely everything about smart contracts is terrible and misconceived. I don't believe there is any way to do them right, because the idea is fundamentally wrong.

Here's (an older draft, need to update) what I actually say about Solidity and Ethereum smart contracts: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/ethereum-smart-contract...

Are you asserting Szabo's original smart contracts idea "is terrible and misconceived", or Ethereum's implementation "is terrible and misconceived". The latter, I would have to agree; hard forking as a response to these kinds of security holes is neither sustainable nor scalable, and I'm very partial to mechanical proof-based designs and implementations as a result.

Szabo's idea was a hypothetical for two decades. Ethereum is the first smart contracts platform people actually write for. There were attempts to do it previously, but Ethereum is the one that actually took off.

So if you're talking about Ethereum as a bad implementation of a good idea, you're weighing up reality against something that was a hypothetical from 1994 to 2014.

In any case, there's plenty really obviously wrong with the idea of immutable smart contracts. Legal code is a bad match for computer code; immutability means changes in circumstances can't be allowed for; immutability means you must code with zero bugs; the oracle problem (getting real-world data in and out of your smart contract) ...

"Dr. Strangelove" is the story of a smart contract going wrong, unstoppably, immune to human intervention.

Szabo's stuff is better than the reality - he does actually understand law as well as code, and at least early on he considered there was a role for human intervention - but it's still the sort of thing that's "interesting" rather than "a good idea".