Lets look at what Nick Szabo actually said in context.
When we do that, we find that in fact, he's talking about technologies needing practical exposure to markets and users in order to evolve. He's talking about it being messy "out there" and that iterative cycles of deploy-learn-develop are required to produce something that's robust enough and practical enough at the same time to be successful.
Few cryptos have done as much justice to this ethic than Dash. It's basically had a baptism of fire since day one and successfully responded and improved according to market and industry priorities. Deployments have been delivered, revisions created, long term design goals refined and focused, new opportunities discovered - all from having been "out there". Most importantly - it survived and now has a roadmap that does justice to that survival.
Meanwhile, by way of contrast, lets take something like Monero: Ironically, that WAS designed in secret in an ivory tower, got shoved "out there", has had almost nothing done on it since, has lost 90% of its value from launch, suffers from
confidence problems, the wrong monetary model and a defective implementation at launch - all on top of an almost non-existent set of end user tools.
Shipping broken code is fine or even ideal for some projects, but not ones involving people's money.
Fintech has higher standards, such as ACTUALLY TESTING YOUR CODE BEFORE YOU LAUNCH A PRODUCT.
Dash's 'design in secret, then launch and find out what's broken' approach is ass-backwards. That's exactly how the instamine fiasco happened.
It's equivalent to building a house from the roof down, and pouring the foundation as the last step.
That's not at all what Szabo endorsed and only a DashHole cultist would fail to see the difference.
Your
tu quoque (appeal to hypocrisy) is a logical fallacy, but I will address it anyway. Bytecoin was designed in secret; Monero is being rewritten in public starting from that point. As for end user tools, the CLI and mymonero.org web wallet work just fine for sending/receiving XMR.
You are blatantly lying when you claim XMR "has had almost nothing done on it since." Anyone may easily verify you are a fucking liar by clicking
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/tree/masterand confirming the number of commits (presently 1,263).
Dash