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> Yes and no. I think trust in itself is actually just a bad thing all around. Trust implies that you are you're placing some sort of authority in somebody else

> Yes and no. I think trust in itself is actually just a bad thing all around. Trust implies that you are you're placing some sort of authority in somebody else, or in some organization, and they will be able to use this authority in some arbitrary way. This is just such a fantasy land. There's a guy who wrote The Knowledge, a book that (for fun, basically) describes the knowledge we would need to rebuild society if we suddenly forgot everything. Like when and how do we grow crops. What do effective tools for sowing look like? Like if we instantly forget everything, this book is what we need to bootstrap quickly. He was asked "what about government?". His answer was "there's no point. The guy with the biggest gun will be the government". And that's true today. And it's why web3 is idiotic. "Truth" won't help you, and "trust" doesn't matter, when the government (in the form of the police) knock on your door and say no, actually, your smart contract is an illegal scheme and we are going to put you in a locked room for a while now. You neither have to believe in the government, nor trust it, for it to force society's will upon you.

berberous 5y ago
The world is not black and white, and I think you are missing the point. While what you are saying is true to an extent, we can still decrease trust and replace it with verifiable and auditable mechanisms at the margins. For example, the Fed currently states that they target a 2% annual inflation. Well, the US could just adopt a virtual currency, and hard code a 2% inflation amount that was verifiable in public code. Note that I’m not saying this contrived example is necessarily good or bad, but let’s just assume everyone agrees 2% inflation is good and hard coding a 2% money increase rate is equivalent and it’s not better to give the government flexibility. This change has the effect of reducing our need to trust that the government will act consistent with its messaging; we can prove it. And while the men with guns can always change the rules (and maybe they should in some scenarios), it’s easy to see when the rules are being changed, and it’s likely harder to do so if it’s not a good idea since there are structural forces that make it more difficult. The US government is filled with mechanisms to reduce trust (eg checks and balances). And the reduction of trust is not just a government point. Twitter grew by having a great public API which it then knee capped and harmed the developers who trusted them. Would it not be better to have a protocol incentive that you could more readily trust would not be changed under you? What if the Twitter API had a governance token where the indie developers had owned a large stake of such tokens?
- knorker 5y ago
  Your example is a great example of how absolutely catastrophic and disconnected from reality blockchain people are. This idea that we can pre-commit to ideas, and not only that we should pre-commit to a course of action with no option to change as new data comes in, but that we are actually able to correctly codify this perfectly, is preposterous. A bug in a smart contract can make murder legal, or loophole an interest rate to be a billion percent. It's delusional to think that anyone would want this. A court or legislative body simply has to be able to undo bugs, to overrule. Maybe we can't trust the government very well, but we KNOW that we can trust smart contracts to completely fuck us with no recourse.

berberous 5y ago

The world is not black and white, and I think you are missing the point. While what you are saying is true to an extent, we can still decrease trust and replace it with verifiable and auditable mechanisms at the margins. For example, the Fed currently states that they target a 2% annual inflation. Well, the US could just adopt a virtual currency, and hard code a 2% inflation amount that was verifiable in public code. Note that I’m not saying this contrived example is necessarily good or bad, but let’s just assume everyone agrees 2% inflation is good and hard coding a 2% money increase rate is equivalent and it’s not better to give the government flexibility. This change has the effect of reducing our need to trust that the government will act consistent with its messaging; we can prove it. And while the men with guns can always change the rules (and maybe they should in some scenarios), it’s easy to see when the rules are being changed, and it’s likely harder to do so if it’s not a good idea since there are structural forces that make it more difficult. The US government is filled with mechanisms to reduce trust (eg checks and balances). And the reduction of trust is not just a government point. Twitter grew by having a great public API which it then knee capped and harmed the developers who trusted them. Would it not be better to have a protocol incentive that you could more readily trust would not be changed under you? What if the Twitter API had a governance token where the indie developers had owned a large stake of such tokens?

knorker 5y ago
Your example is a great example of how absolutely catastrophic and disconnected from reality blockchain people are. This idea that we can pre-commit to ideas, and not only that we should pre-commit to a course of action with no option to change as new data comes in, but that we are actually able to correctly codify this perfectly, is preposterous. A bug in a smart contract can make murder legal, or loophole an interest rate to be a billion percent. It's delusional to think that anyone would want this. A court or legislative body simply has to be able to undo bugs, to overrule. Maybe we can't trust the government very well, but we KNOW that we can trust smart contracts to completely fuck us with no recourse.