The fact that other people could audit the software does not absolve the original authors of the fact that they didn't.
If you put on github
Return x>0;
And I deploy this in a production environment that kills people with heart rate over 0, do you have any responsibility? No of course not. I do. You have none.
In short: if you put money into something as smart contracts, the only thing you have, and that is literally the intention of the pundits, is that you check the contracts and trust or not trust them. I do not know how this crosses over to other software that has different properties in this thread. That is not relevant. There is no one to sue or say they did a bad job here: you will not know. That is baked in.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, there is no such thing as bug-free software (even for devices that kill people, as you point out), because bug-free software is categorically impossible within comp sci.
Knowing this comes with great responsibility, even more so when dealing with life... or finances. The developers of this software, as is the case with Solidity and smart contracts in general, have foregone this responsibility.
Another egregious failing of all crypto schemes which I'm compelled to point out is that they fail to use any of their enormous profits to actually fix bugs.
When I was mainframe developer at IBM, the company spent millions of dollars (taken from clients, of course) to find and fix bugs. They paid people good money, including yours truly, for that work.
Today's crypto companies have no such ethics. They (Mr. Buterin, I'm looking at you) have no compunctions after profiting windfalls from their software inventions to actually invest in debugging or fix distribution (or even real error reporting) for the customers. Likewise, they ignore all the UI aspects (and problems) that their inventions have birthed.
This is not responsible software development. It leads to problems like IRON and others in the crypto space. As I said, it is the exact opposite of how, historically, important enterprise software development is done.
It's only for selfish reasons (= money hoarding) that crypto projects don't hire the best auditors and coders in the world to fix their code. They can certainly afford them.
I vehemently disagree that just writing code makes your responsible for it's use. We are so bad at writing good code that all programmers would be living on the streets or in jail. And that is not malice, just how little we understand or underestimate complexity. Which becomes apparent if you indeed try to create some formal proof and give up after 30 pages.
I also believe your last statement does not recognize the vast issue there is with the smart contract world: I am more of the school of Erlang/OTP: just let it crash these days. If you cannot correct a state, we cannot write software for it. No matter the proofs and auditing. If we cannot correct an erroneous state, we are not capable of writing software in that system. And that is smart contracts. Not space craft where we often can upload a patch and steer the other way, not cars where we detect a deviation and correct it. Smart contracts are: if it's done it is irreversible and there are no programmers, provers or auditors who can predict or prevent that. Rollback must exist or this all will go to shit. Which is what will happen.
Edit: I actually do not believe cryptocurrencies have a chance unless there is rollback (something like refunds without merchant consent). I just cannot see what rollback means in this context: I read papers with scifi type of stories how this would work but it does not mesh with cryptocurrency obviously otherwise.
