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Are you asserting Szabo's original smart contracts idea "is terrible and misconceived", or Ethereum's implementation "is terrible and misconceived". The latter,

• davidgerard 9y ago
  Szabo's idea was a hypothetical for two decades. Ethereum is the first smart contracts platform people actually write for. There were attempts to do it previously, but Ethereum is the one that actually took off. So if you're talking about Ethereum as a bad implementation of a good idea, you're weighing up reality against something that was a hypothetical from 1994 to 2014. In any case, there's plenty really obviously wrong with the idea of immutable smart contracts. Legal code is a bad match for computer code; immutability means changes in circumstances can't be allowed for; immutability means you must code with zero bugs; the oracle problem (getting real-world data in and out of your smart contract) ... "Dr. Strangelove" is the story of a smart contract going wrong, unstoppably, immune to human intervention. Szabo's stuff is better than the reality - he does actually understand law as well as code, and at least early on he considered there was a role for human intervention - but it's still the sort of thing that's "interesting" rather than "a good idea".