Both of these stem from what can only be described as narrow-mindedness.

The Either-Or Trap

A great example of the first trap can be seen in Jimmy Song's blog post, "The Truth about Smart Contracts". In it, Song takes aim at Ethereum and argues:

"smart contracts are simply too easy to screw up, too difficult to secure, too hard to make trustless and have too many external dependencies to work for most things."

As a developer, it's hard for me to believe another technologist would downplay the incredible disruptive potential of smart contracts. Software is eating the world, and smart contracts allow us to do things with software that were previously unimaginable.

Are there issues to work through and best-practices yet to be developed? Sure. It's fair to point these issues out and Jimmy does a good job of covering some of them in his piece.

But we're talking about trust-minimized code manipulating immutable, auditable data— code that can create, manage, and move a multitude of scarce digital assets. To dismiss the far reaching implications of that outright— simply because the ecosystem is still in an embryonic state— is preposterous.

Jimmy is smart enough to know better, but his narrow-minded focus on cryptocurrency as sound money makes other use cases seem like a threat. If smart contracts will detract from sound money, then for maximalists, smart contracts must be bad. But the two are not in opposition. In fact, they're quite complimentary. Which would you rather have: sound money, or programmable sound money?

This same negative attitude is on display for other obviously disruptive use cases as well, such as tokenized securities.