Ethereum Is a Dark Forest
I can&#x27;t imagine running (or investing) in a software-based company here without also having an automatic model checking layer for verifying all runs + 24&#x2F;7 monitoring for disabling any live contract. If you&#x27;re going to put $10M+, years of your life, and who knows how much customer money into this, why not spend $500K of it so you&#x27;re running with the blockchain equiv of CI testing? You&#x27;d be able to deploy <i>faster</i>, with more confidence and less stress, and fewer of these weird midnight Europe phone calls.<p>Viable model checkers for basic software contracts existed since the 80&#x27;s, and the modern incarnations are insanely powerful (Z3, ...) + quite approachable (Rosette, ...). They&#x27;re used to tackle software verification problems magnitudes harder than &quot;money can only go from here to there in this tiny software contract&quot;: race detection in distributed file systems, bugs in hardware circuits, security holes in big javascript libraries, etc. I think of these same not-very-secret tools every time I see one of these articles, and yet the engineering fails keep happening.<p>A few teams deploy tech here, including built on the above, but it seems like most do not. I&#x27;d say mind-blowing, but at this point... mind-numbing?<p>I do appreciate the author being frank about how bad the status quo is.<p>EDIT: To give a sense of this -- the same people will talk about meticulous cold storage key exchanges with someone always being there to watch, driving into the desert for bootstrapping secrets, and then for their actual operations, deploy unverified contracts.