| This is a very important issue you raise. In terms of the blockchains themselves, they all have a kind of built-in bounty, in that if on-chain funds have inherent risk of being lost or taken due to faults in the system, this will have happened - as the biggest / most popular systems are valued in the multi-billions. Ie, a huge bounty if an exploit exists. To my knowledge, this has not occurred to date with any of the major systems themselves. It's important not to mistake the above with a different issue of trusting applications development built on blockchain projects. Almost all blockchains have kind of two layers of functionality. The base layer allows self-custody and transfer. Above that, people can build other things using smart contract languages, or hardware solutions, or software that interacts with the chain. Those can have huge bugs or be outright scams. It's a bit like HTTPS could be provably secure, but that doesn't mean if you visit https://dodgy-website.com-dodgy.tk you're protected against it doing something dodgy. The different is while HTTPS is limited in its user-facing application, the base layer of say Bitcoin or Ethereum isn't so much. People can securely store and transact any amount with anyone worldwide, sometimes in seconds, with complete finality and determinism, without needing to trust anyone in between. In almost all cases, you also have access to the code, and can build it yourself. But as mentioned, the built-in bounty acts as your best security. Eg, if there was a hole in the base layer of Bitcoin right now, there's hundreds of billions up for grabs. |