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> Formal Verification: Get an absolute 100% guarantee that your contracts are free of errors

Seems to me that should be priority #1 considering there's potentially millions of $local_currency riding on these contracts and they seem to be done with the hard forks when one goes awry (though I was reading that they collude to make it really, really hard to sell off the ill gotten gains).

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> Formal Verification: Get an absolute 100% guarantee that your contracts are free of errors

This is not actually possible, there could have been an issue with your threat model. e.g. side-channel attacks could be out of scope.

Formal verification only ever verifies as far as your spec specifies

That is true, but it should not be assumed that a spec. is a thing of fixed validity. A formal spec. has a reasonable likelihood of being less ambiguous, incomplete or self-contradictory than an informal one, or whatever substitutes for a spec. in an agile approach.

That only tells me a spec and its formal verification are necessary but not sufficient assets. Not "we can't prove everything so we'll keep our millions riding on half-assed piles of garbage.

A ycombinator backed project called Quantstamp aims to preform security audits for smart contracts, and seems like a very necessary part of the platform ecosystem that is developing.

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