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!