Item — HN Reader

> On smart contracts: "Of course, writing programs that produce permanent financial consequences gives me some pretty serious anxiety, and I would hope that most senior engineers would feel the same."

I don't believe most senior engineers would feel the same. It's hard to imagine our world today without programs that produce permanent financial consequences. They are everywhere.

2 comments

Okay, go write a "smart" mortgage and put all your money into it. Let me know how you feel about this.

Of course every bug has financial effects, software is designed to make money in the vast majority of cases. But to write software that can literally drain every single last dollar from your clients or yourself in an unrecoverable fashion just because _any_ programming error is insanity to me.

Even a stupid bug in the alarm clocks of mobile phones can be a hit in the economy. It happened before and it will happen again.