And the term and concept were not popularized until Ethereum in 2014. I never heard anyone commonly refer to bitcoin scripting as smart contracts.
>Yes I would like that ability please. What are the reasons they don't?
There are some already mentioned in other comments here so I won't repeat them. If you want a full response, you should ask them. But if you must know, a lot of existing trading platforms and payment systems do already give you this ability in some form, no blockchains are required at all.
>in its /outcome/, fundamentally different from the existing bank network. It is one where an Iranian teenager can design a financial protocol on equal terms to Goldman Sachs. This is a desirable feature.
I'm sorry but no, this also doesn't make any sense and there are no desirable features or different outcomes here. From a starting position the main difference between the teenager and Goldman Sachs is the teenager doesn't have billions of dollars in capital. Everything else is technical minutiae. If the suggestion here is that the teenager can somehow take out an unsecured billion dollar loan in ETH, that's not a desirable or even functional financial system at all.
I mean seriously here. If you want to make real investments in businesses run by teenagers and other young entrepreneurs I think that's great. You don't need to blockchains to do that. They provide no useful features. I could go into extreme detail here as to why this is the case.
>This design brings with it other consequences. It is simply part of the the nature of the thing.
No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no "nature" to it. Like any money system, it is designed by humans to further a certain goal and it absolutely does not have to have any particular consequences. It doesn't have to make fraud as easy as it does, but it was purposely designed to be that way because the goal is explicitly to avoid regulations.