How can we make blockchains safer?

[Jarvis IO]

Recently, Gavin Andresen posted about the fact that alternative blockchains can be open for malicious viruses and can spread them like wildfire.

Here's what he said:

" When I first heard about bitcoin, my questions were:

1) Can it possibly work (do the ideas for how it works make sense)?
2) Is it a scam?
3) If it is not a scam, could it open my computer up to viruses/trojans if I run it?

I answered those questions by:

1) Reading and understanding Satoshi's whitepaper.  Then thinking about it for a day or two and reading it again.
2) Finding out everything I could about the project.  I read every forum thread here (there were probably under a hundred threads back then) and read Satoshi's initial postings on the crypto mailing list.
3) Downloaded and skimmed the source code to see if it looked vulnerable to buffer overflow or other remotely exploitable attacks.

If I were going to experiment with an alternative block-chain, I'd go through the same process again. But I'm an old conservative fuddy-duddy. "

He's making some awesome points and it really made me wonder - what can future blockchain developers and architects do to make blockchains safer and what should investors look for in a project in that safety aspect?

Thanks all!

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1715035621

[LeGaulois]

Working on the network architecture is the first point. You can imagine being able to control who is allowed to operate a node, as well as how nodes are connected. There is surely something to do by creating " central" nodes  and select only some nodes able to perform the verification

[Jarvis IO]

Working on the network architecture is the first point. You can imagine being able to control who is allowed to operate a node, as well as how nodes are connected. There is surely something to do by creating " central" nodes  and select only some nodes able to perform the verification

Thanks for the reply! Wouldn't that bring in more centralisation, though - we see in some blockchains (won't name anyone) how controlling the nodes, even if aspiring to be through democracy, is actually just central control of the nodes and therefore the chain.

[LeGaulois]

Yeah, it can be the drawback. But you can be able to create 2 different types of nodes with one of it requiring more computing power, etc  and tasked differently. Anyone could be able to create the 2 node types