[zenkat]

Etherium's fundamental premise -- "code is law" -- presupposes a general solution to the formal verification of program correctness. This is an unsolved problem (and is likely unsolvable in the complete case).

Put simply, all code has bugs. How can Etherium ever work in practice at scale?

[kerkeslager]

There are proposed Ethereum-like systems which use tables and formal proving systems to validate contracts, which may be a good-enough solution to bugs in contracts (this is untested). However, the Ethereum community as a whole doesn't even see this as a problem, and is happy with their JavaScript-like contract language, so I don't see any real potential that they will even attempt to solve this problem.

[dmix]

> How can Etherium ever work in practice at scale?

Aren't there a to of Bitcoin organizations with hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through them? If these companies found a way to operate safely with manageable risk, through things like cold storage and encryption schemes, than how is it much different from Ethereum?

It's fun to say things like "code is law" and imagine everything happens within this self-contained bubble but this stuff still operates in the real world and there are risks and consequences for actions as well as real world security mechanisms regardless.

[mannykannot]

It works because Bitcoin is only the ledger - the accounting part. All the contractual aspects of the business activity are external to the blockchain, and are handled in the traditional way - through civil law and procedures.