From the POV of software engineering, smart contracts are really interesting in the following sense: there has pretty much never been any software stack where t

From the POV of software engineering, smart contracts are really interesting in the following sense: there has pretty much never been any software stack where the cost of a bug/design flaw is so severe and so immediately punishing (except, maybe, space shuttle control type software). As exemplified by - historically - the infamous DAO, and since then a very long string of buggy smart contracts leading to large loss of monies (this one being the latest), smart contracts are really good at curing SWE hubris that they are actually capable of writing bug-free code without machine assistance. For all the bad things people say about blockchains and related tech., I suspect they will bring about a new era in formal software verification methods.