Consider a blockchain project with thousands of lines of code as a black box. There may be critical bugs or issues hidden within it. Each of them can act as a potential bomb, and if someone finds and triggers them, they can cause serious damage. But how does a blockchain secure itself against these potential threats?

The answer is “Decentralization”. Decentralization makes a blockchain secure, even if it has potential bugs or issues.

If a blockchain is not decentralized, it doesn’t have value, and therefore, no one will care about it. Even if a hacker bothers to find the bomb, it doesn’t matter. No one gets hurt by exploding a bomb in the desert.

But what about a decentralized blockchain? What happens if someone finds one of these “bombs” within the blockchain? There are two real-world scenarios that can happen here:

  1. A white hat hacker finds the issue first, and tries to fix it before it cause any trouble. Like disposing the bomb before exploding. The Bitcoin Transaction Malleability or Block Merkle calculation exploit are good examples of how the development team can fix potential problems before they cause any serious damage.

  2. A black hat hacker finds the issue first and
  3. exploits it for personal gain or to ruin the blockchain’s reputation. This damage can be destructive. But even in this case, if a blockchain is truly decentralized, the community can recover the blockchain from the damage. It’s hard to imagine a scenario worse than the DAO attack on Ethereum. In the DAO attack, more than 3.64 million or about 5% of the total supply was hacked. But the community decided to undo this attack by forking the blockchain. It was controversial and funny, but it worked!

In conclusion, decentralization makes a blockchain secure, not the algorithm, but the algorithm is important to make a blockchain decentralized. A poorly implemented or overly complex blockchain can’t be decentralized. It is a chicken and egg story.