The easiest counterexample would be Ethereum itself, who had a teenager as its public face, and raised large amounts of funds on top of mostly just a whitepaper, yet turned out to actually deliver all the crazy stuff they promised.
I dunno; I'm still trying to figure out whether it's a great idea or the worst idea. I don't want to have to do a code review on my investments; at large enough scale, lawyers are way cheaper than losing money.
Why on earth would you want this? That's tantamount to replacing the court system itself, and I definitely prefer juries and judges to compilers and debuggers.
I'm just a bystander in all this but I distinctly remember the phrase the code is law bandied about, followed by a hard fork.
Also, "the exception proves the rule" is a misinterpretation of the phrase. "Proves" here means "puts to the test", and the saying means that you can tell whether a rule holds up by seeing what happens when it is tested. Ethereum demonstrated that the rule does not hold up.
We were considering implementing some of our blockchain IPO and corporate governance via a smart contract, but decided to punt on it. It's flashy, it'd help us raise more money, but it just does not seem like a smart idea at the moment. We'll use a basic ERC20 contract to account for who owns shares (and pay dividends) but nothing more involved than that for now.
