I am rather optimistic about blockchain for the exact opposite reasons. I don't believe it is "trustless" but rather "distributed trust" or "decentralized trust

I am rather optimistic about blockchain for the exact opposite reasons. I don't believe it is "trustless" but rather "distributed trust" or "decentralized trust". Depending on entities like banks to determine who could/should be trusted, e.g., for loans, has allowed systematic discrimination against marginalized parties like African-Americans to continue for centuries. Being able to push the determination of trust out to the entities closest to the interested parties - perhaps those in their community who have lent them money and had it paid back - could allow for those people to have the same opportunities as the 'mainstream'. There have been rumblings about Yelp reviews being manipulated for years. Small business reviews on blockchain don't allow for that kind of manipulation - and could be integrated with smart contracts that verify that only actual patrons of that business could leave reviews. My personal favorite is the idea of blockchain election systems. It's not that I don't trust the U.S. government _per se_, but Congress has shown astounding indifference to modernizing and securing our election systems on their own. I would vastly prefer a well-designed decentralized implementation over whatever they could implement, securely, centrally. PS I'm not saying these implementations are trivial or easy in any way, nor are we necessarily ready for them, especially for the general public. But I do feel that removing centralized arbiters of trust could leave us in a better place than where we started.