This is part three of a multiple part series beginning with: “What is Blockchain Technology?” where we explore blockchain and how it can best be leveraged for business today.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this is probably the most glossed over issue with blockchain systems in the industry today. While we can all imagine the benefits of automated contracts, distributed value systems, and individual digital ownership of assets, we should all be equally as concerned about them. For example:
- If you make a transaction to the wrong address, that asset transfer is in most cases completely unrecoverable.
- If you deploy a smart contract with an exploit in the programming, the software can’t just be updated to fix it.
- If you don’t maintain secure and accessible environments for your access keys, you can be locked out your accounts forever.
- If the consensus model isn’t secure for your distributed network, an attacker can seize control of the entire blockchain ledger and write transactions as they see fit.
So as you can see, there are some serious implications for human error when using a blockchain system. In fact, the consequences looming over me while engineering blockchain systems feel quite similar to the life and death…
