This is what concerns me about contract programming. With human contract law, if there's a minor typo or loophole, participants can generally see the spirit and intent, and at worst go to a judge who will usually enforce the intent. But with software contracts, only the characters matter and there's no intent anywhere: either you get paid or you don't.
ETH is advising, "Contract authors should ... be very careful about recursive call bugs, and listen to advice from the Ethereum contract programming community," which indicates there's some subtle behaviors to be aware of and secure contracts are apparently not easy to write.
Lest you think, "we'll just be careful, review and QA it", consider the bug[1] in the "Programming Pearls" binary search. Bentley was clearly an expert who had proven the algorithm correct and the algorithm had 20 years of careful study by thousands of professionals. Yet it had a simple overflow.
How do _you_ know your contract is secure?
1. https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all...
ETH is advising, "Contract authors should ... be very careful about recursive call bugs, and listen to advice from the Ethereum contract programming community," which indicates there's some subtle behaviors to be aware of and secure contracts are apparently not easy to write.
Lest you think, "we'll just be careful, review and QA it", consider the bug[1] in the "Programming Pearls" binary search. Bentley was clearly an expert who had proven the algorithm correct and the algorithm had 20 years of careful study by thousands of professionals. Yet it had a simple overflow.
How do _you_ know your contract is secure?
1. https://research.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all...