> Should Ethereum not have been launched until it had solid methods for auditing and proving? Maybe, but that's not how the world works, typically. Worse is better and all that.
As a platform for experimentation that's fine. As a platform for doing real things with meaningful amounts of money, it's madness.
Madness indeed. For better or for worse, silly experiments in this industry often turn out to win. According to the "Worse is Better" theory, that's partly because they ship much faster than the projects that want to get everything right, and they're also easier for most people to understand. You could put a team of Ph.D's on inventing a really amazing smart contract formalism based on higher-order zygomorphic type theory, but if only five people in the universe understood it, we wouldn't be talking about it.
As a platform for experimentation that's fine. As a platform for doing real things with meaningful amounts of money, it's madness.