Is there any form of auditing that contracts can go through to not have these pitfalls?
I wonder how many of them are still undiscovered...
People are realizing that this needs to be developed like safety-critical software, not like fast-moving startup websites. But I would say it's not as scary as, say, developing software for aerospace or medical applications.
And what really helps is that you can do a lot with very little code. I think all of my contracts are under five pages. I don't think we're ready for big complicated contracts, but there's a lot we can do with simple little contracts.
Five pages is an outside estimate, for something like a currency exchange. My crowdfunding contract is about two pages, and the vault is one.
If the point is to be an alternative to normal, "dumb" contracts, than that is exactly what it needs to be comparable to.
And how much software would you have to write in addition to that? On Ethereum the back-end software and the "contract" are the same thing, since the software enforces the terms.
Yes,
but,
English
is
not
commonly
written
with
conventional
programming
whitespace and indentation
practices.Yup. I find it interesting how everyone only thinks it's these couple of issues. I wouldn't do anything beyond experiments with it at this point.
Even though the coding experience seems pretty poor, it doesn't appear to be particularly dangerous as bad contracts can just be rolled back.