Composability and Diversity

History repeats itself.  It especially feels that way in the blockchain security space.

One of the advantages of blockchain (and the early days of the internet) is composability — our ability to build on someone else’s work.  Often because it’s open source.

A recent hack on Binance chain was the result of composability.  Code had been taken from one project and imported into Binance chain.  Turns out that code had a bug.

In 1989, Clifford Stoll wrote in a fantastic book on one of the first documented hacking attempts.  He writes 30 years ago “diversity in software is a good thing.”

As we build on to the open source internet with open source blockchain components, we should be thinking about composability, diversity and of course security.