Comment by warbiscuit

Followup just to clarify: The reason smart contracts drastically mitigate "server compromise" is that compromising / altering the operation of the VM (and not merely exploiting a bug) requires a 51% attack on the entire network. That should generally be a MUCH more expensive undertaking than the value of any given smart contract (under the assumption that the network will be valued at least 2x more than any of it's participating apps).