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The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that idea

The problem I have with blockchain enthusiasts, after talking with them about their philosophy, is that they seem to consider trust a bug, and believe that ideal world is achievable with straitjackets of technical solutions that eliminate trust. Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. However, blockchain-adjacent initiatives seem to suggest a future where we implicitly label[1] every human as motivated to hurt another by making all aspects of their activities subject to verification checks. In addition to strong dystopian vibes, won’t this act of labeling everyone as potential threat actually be instrumental in bringing this motivation to everyone, making it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Aren’t we sort of codifying malicious intent, instead of trying to remove it from the equation? Whom would this serve? There is place for verification in the interim, such as maintaining security of your home, but if we are looking ahead (as blockchain enthusiasts do) we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. Not treating it as some sort of default is a good start. [0] Their core motivation to benefit at others’ expense is to me indicative of mental health issues, possibly caused by insecurity and upbringing trauma. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeling_theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labeling_theory

vosper 4y ago
You hit the nail on the head with this comment. And not only is trust a feature, it’s a requirement for society. It’s a deep part of human nature to trust, and trust can’t be removed from how people manage to function in groups.
- gitfan86 4y ago
  The problem is scale. If society only had 400 people, the 390 people that were not scammers could remove the 10 people who are scammers from their economic system manually. If you create a online store, one million strangers could connect to it. You need a way to understand who is a scammer in that situation.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    This is true, and why all political ideologies fail. They can't cater for scale, or when they do, they do so by tyranny, which also fails eventually. Blockchain/Bitcoin has already been thoroughly corrupted, so ironically will prove itself to be entirely untrustworthy before it even gets established as whatever wonderful thing is assumed is still coming from it.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Who has bitcoin been corrupted by?
      - headsoup 4y ago
        The exchanges. Clearly and factually.
        ntoskrnl 4y ago
        If I use my private key to send a transaction to your public key, the exchanges have no say in it. You can choose who to trust. If some exchange is corrupted, just don't use it.
        rglullis 4y ago
        The price of the coin is being manipulated by the exchanges, no matter if you use it or not. One exchange in particular (Bitfinex) is helping to keep the largest fraud scheme in history (Tether/USDT) around.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        I dont understand what you mean. Is there somewhere I can read about this?
        headsoup 4y ago
        For a straightforward start, this guy piles on a bit, but also holds a lot of the history/evidence on record too: https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed
nverno 4y ago
Everyone is a potential threat, that's the whole point of trust in the first place. If that wasn't the case, trust (in terms of safety) wouldnt even be a thing.
- johtso 4y ago
  Not if you reframe it as the absence of mistrust, trusting being the natural state.
  - nverno 4y ago
    Trusting blindly is not a natural state. We evolved in the ecosystem you see around you. In freak cases, eg. the dodo bird, you can see what happens when blind trust meets competition.
    - headsoup 4y ago
      I think this is why it is problematic these days. Trust in simple terms would be trusting your local community but not the 'outside' world. But now we're trying to make the whole world one community, so who to distrust? Everyone, because you don't actually really know many people at all 'inside' your community. Everyone is inside and outside at once. It feels like blockchain is trying to be a solution for the 'global community' that can't trust itself, but will never solve that problem because it's inherently an unsolvable utopian dream.
    - strogonoff 4y ago
      Isn’t it fundamentally an artifact of scarcity? What if with technological advances in automation and energy sources humanity were approaching a world without it?
bawolff 4y ago
I disagree - trust is a bug in technical systems. Maintaining trust has a really high cost and is an obvious and common single point of failure. Take TLS - wouldn't it be nice if we could have the same system without certificate authorities? The thing is - like everything else, trust is a tradeoff. Bitcoin folks will discard it at any cost. Sometimes discarding it is not worth the cost. That doesn't mean adding trusted third parties is a good thing, just that it is often the lesser evil.
- atoav 4y ago
  The thing is, it is not always a bug and it does not always help to give the decision out of your own hands. E.g. I would really trust myself to decide which products should stay in my Online Shop and which I want out. I don't need (or even want) a public append-only structure that is out of my control. For me the blockchain is good for all usecases where I would in real life use a notary. And that is not many use cases.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  But even with Bitcoin you're super reliant on trust in (a) the technology not to be broken or compromised and (b) the system that supports the actual world outside of crypto (i.e. actual resources that matter).
- strogonoff 4y ago
  But that is in technical systems. More or less it’s an equivalent of defending your home, or using password auth: there are humans motivated to increase their well-being at your expense (at the expense of the environment, and so on). This tech seems often to be pushed onto human society as a whole, though. It’s like giving up on solving the underlying issues that give humans the above-mentioned motivation to betray each other, and instead baking into the fabric society an assumption that it’s human nature to be this way.
  - snikeris 4y ago
    The tech (money) has already been adopted by human society as a whole though. So it's not about pushing tech onto human society, but upgrading the existing tech. > It’s like giving up on solving the underlying issues that give humans the above-mentioned motivation to betray each other, and instead baking into the fabric society an assumption that it’s human nature to be this way. Not all humans are that way, but those who desire power tend to be. I simply don't trust those in power to manage the money properly. It's too much power for anyone to wield. This is not theory; the historical record is damning for fiat money. Also, as the world has become more globalized, a world reserve currency has emerged. It makes trade easier if everyone has $USD on hand. However, other countries shouldn't have to trust in the good faith in the U.S. government just to engage in global commerce.
noduerme 4y ago
You're right on a lot of things here, (I appreciate the slightly humorous, gratuitous take on bad actors having had a bad upbringing) but you seem to be inverting the flaws in the no-trust paradigm into a trust-but-verify paradigm based on an assumption of implicit goodness which is no more borne out by reality than the assumption of implicit evil. Maybe it makes more sense to look at it all through a different lens. Classical, post-mercantile liberal economics, - that is, liberalism - is entirely built around a framework for dealing with the question of establishing trust between parties: Individuals do not have to establish trust, or agree with each other, or be friends, if they certify that they acquiesce to a system where the market is well regulated. In exchange they get the advantage of being in a market where trade can be a non-zero game that advantages both parties. The problem with crypto as it stands has something to do with unregulated markets, something to do with bad actors, but a lot more to do with the fact that no one has yet come up with a use for deflationary currency that's something other than a zero-sum game.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  I need time to digest your point, but one note—participants certifying acquiescence to the system still involves trust: as in, you agree to the rules of this mini-game, but I trust that you actually follow them. I suspect that such default meta-trust is sort of important, like presumption of innocence; and if there are people who violate it, then we should throw more resources at treating the underlying causes rather than eliminating symptoms. So far blockchain-based trustless tech to me seems instrumental at treating the symptom only (and I can see how it detracts resources from treating the cause), thus I am wary of it.
xorcist 4y ago
While certainly not wanting to ruing the humorous undertones here, just for the benefit of other readers it's important to point out that the lack of third party trust has a very specific meaning. Take for web for example. It is trustless in the same manner. There is no third party (apart from the web browser and the server) that you need to trust in order for you to view a web page. There is no International Web Organization that you need to procure permission from in order to set up a web server. You just start it. (And, conversely, also why so much bad actors exist on the web.) This is fundamentally a different system than for example all economic transactions, apart from cash. This is why some people argues against the cashless society for not being trustless, and also what the people who experiment with private monetary systems study.
- tlarkworthy 4y ago
  Web is not trustless DNS is part of the web and it is a federated/heirarchical 3rd party trust model you need to route your named traffic to the right server, often managed by states. It's super important to understand, this is why authoritarian governments can still hide what citizens can experience on the internet
- qsdf38100 4y ago
  Certificates are required pretty much for any websites nowadays. IIRC it has to do with TLS, so basically all https websites. Those certificates are ultimately based on a trusted third party. So web is not trustless, not even close.
rglullis 4y ago
> The problem with blockchainers It's hard to take any of what you say seriously when you start a comment with such a blanket statement. Also, I think I've already seen your type of "argument" so many times, I think I am able to just play the whole tape by just pointing out to previous comments I've made: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195939 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31545427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31545427 (trustlessness is not about "eliminating trust") - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463534 (Yeah, you are right that there is no such thing as an "ideal" world. What you are missing is that also applies to the anti-crypto mentality, who think that just because they were born in a place with functional institutions, they think that is the natural state of things. It's good when institutions work, but they are not perfect and we need to prepared for the times when they fail.)
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  It's easy enough to have a discussion about you which you don't take seriously An anti-vaxxer might respond the same way to "the problem with anti-vaxxers," hoping to make sure that nobody discusses the very real problems with them It's generally okay if people being criticized don't want the people speaking about them to think poorly of them. It's generally okay if a person being criticized believes that what's said to them can be rebuffed with canned content. You go ahead and tell everyone that the reason you're polluting with a dysfunctional casino is "you weren't born with functional institutions" if you like Every notice how anti-vaxxers have canned responses that they think landed, but nobody else does?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Did you notice your rhetoric is so poor that you could not address any actual argument? You did nothing except (a) resorting to throw false accusations hoping that this is enough to discredit your "opponent" and (b) "othering" via an absurd analogy? If you only tried to reason properly and read at least part of what has been discussed before, you'd find out that: - I am not in favor of BTC. I think it worked as a proof-of-concept for a system to transfer value without intermediaries, but it has failed as a currency - no privacy, too expensive, too volatile and its fixed supply makes it unworkable as money. - I am not in favor of PoW. There are cheaper and more efficient ways to secure a blockchain and we are close to make a switch. - I am not in favor of all these token projects that create opportunities for speculation but are not connected to real economic activity. My "thing" is using crypto for payments and small-scale banking as an alternative for the global financial system [0]. So, unless you think that the status quo is "good", you will have a better shot at changing my mind if you show me a superior solution to the problem we are trying to tackle. Trying to dismiss me and my work with self-righteous, sophomoric rhetoric does not help anyone and does not solve anything. [0]: https://hub20.io/about https://hub20.io/about
delusional 4y ago
I agree. Trust is fundamental to human society, and without it we can't function. No matter how many fancy technological solutions you layer on top. I think there's a deeper problem that you're ignoring. The desire for trustless systems didn't materialize out of nothing, as has been pointed out many times in the cryptocurrency discussion space. Some of it is surely coming from a libertarian angle of absolute personal freedom to avoid the "unfair" regulation from the government, to avoid the compulsions the state imposes on each of us in order to grant us the rights it does. I think that's a very small part of it though. I think most of the desire for "zero-trust" comes from a disillusion of the current parties seen as trusted. I can at least say that this is what drives the desire within me. It's very hard to see the fairness in paying taxes when I see the people labeled the most trustworthy abuse the system to hide money in tax havens all while using their entrusted positions to lead the economy of the world into an ever deepening hole. When we see the actors labeled "trustworthy" acting maliciously, it becomes hard to trust the system that calls them "trustworthy". I go to work every day where I'm asked to ignore my own instincts and instead do whatever some faceless "process" claims is the right thing to work on. I'm asked to ignore the horrible state of our products and instead focus on the massive piles of money we shovel in the door from out entrusted position as a financial institution. Meanwhile I can turn on the TV to see the very same people talk about how they just couldn't have known that billions were being stolen from my government because it's just so hard to be a bank. That shit does stuff to your trust in other people and I'm not alone in that disillusionment. In that light I think the discussion makes much more sense, even if it doesn't make it any more helpful. Trust is still important, but the current method of obtaining trust, and the by extension people we imbue with it, is broken. For someone in the middle of that, it becomes very logical to discard the whole thing like a junior rewriting a legacy business app.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  I heard the opinion where people don’t want to pay taxes that they don’t think do something good, and because the government can freeze their accounts if they don’t pay then they believe it’s unfair. Presumably, there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom, due to the presence of the aforementioned malicious actors. So I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart—and whom hopefully one voted for, directly or not—have struggled with it and arrived at a solution that works? And if one legitimately thinks it’s a bad solution and cares enough about it, why not attempt to fix it instead? Is this a failure of democracy? Could it be that it moves too slowly for the modern age? Or is there a belief in some underlying conspiracy due to which democracy is not a democracy and no change is possible? Regarding rogue agents exploiting the system to avoid paying taxes, I don’t think should be a factor that affects my decision on whether I should pay taxes (like what a criminal does shouldn’t be my guiding principle). What I would agree on is that there’re people incentivised to attempt to benefit at someone else’s cost, and that those people exist everywhere including corporations, institutions, and the government. I’d also agree that, regarding government specifically, it’s worse because such malicious actors are incentivised to actively seek power because power converts to money very well. It’s a truly regrettable state of affair, because government corruption leads to corruption elsewhere. I think part of the issue is democracies being liable to be influenced by kleptocracies in other countries, who funnel unjustly extracted money into Western economies much to the benefit of individuals at the receiving end. I just don’t think this can be solved technically, we either work on people not being jerks or we will have them find ways to be jerks regardless of any checks, barring complete thought control and predictive crime enforcement dystopia. --- As another analogy, it’s like a distinction between the spirit and the letter. The spirit is the guiding principle, and the letter is a lossy way to express it. Automatic conversion between the spirit and a letter is not possible: this is a philosophical issue adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness; one human not being able to convey to another human the entirety of what they think or feel, words being always interpreted through another mind’s lens. Whether the letter can be expressed on paper or as a smart contract, the letter is never going to be equal fidelity to that of the spirit, and for understandable reasons (such as “fallible humans have written it”) should never have precedence over the spirit. So I wish we invested the effort that goes into inventing higher and higher fidelity letters into, say, alleviating whatever pushes people to violate the spirit in the first place. It’s a much more complex meatspace problem, though.
k__ 4y ago
Don't know what people you talked to, but I'm active in one of the biggest DAOs for 10 months and it's 99% about trust.
kibwen 4y ago
Even without considering the social benefits of trust, from an economic perspective, trust is often enormously, ridiculously efficient compared to distrust. If I need to borrow my neighbor's weed whacker, I don't need to determine its value (plus interest and opportunity cost) and write up a contract and register collateral on the world's slowest and least efficient database, I can just say, hey, mind if I borrow this? Trust and reputation are force multipliers.
- pibechorro 4y ago
  Slowest and least efficient.. you realize some blockchains update in seconds? For a low value proposition like borrowing a lawnmower you dont need the most secure public network on earth to do it. You use the right blocchain for the right applications. The problem with trust, is that its awesome until it aint. When we are deaing with gov policy, billions of dollars, war, your life savings,etc a break in trust is beyond costly, making the use cost of a slower but secure blockchain the responsible thing to do.
  - nonameiguess 4y ago
    So war on the blockchain? That sounds like a good example of what is meant by "dystopian." Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain. It's like you took democracy, but got rid of the elements of constitutional republicanism that mitigate the weaknesses of democracy, leaving only the weaknesses. Except not really, because that would be a plain tyranny of the majority of unique human persons and this is a tyranny of a majority of wealth, which may only be a tiny number of people. I guess it's more like returning to feudalism, except the lords and kings no longer have to raise armies and fight each other. The richest coalition just wins automatically.
    - gumby 4y ago
      > Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain. Actully, this is basically what’s happening in your example. The citizens of the wealthiest countries are participating in the war by sending armaments and aid to Ukraine. The majority of the world’s citizens* are sitting it out or providing some amount of assistance to the Russian side, mainly through commerce. It’s not on the blockchain, but essentially wealth is “voting”. FWIW I’m far, far from being a blockchain supporter. I’m just addressing your example. * yes, at the UN the majority states voted against Russia, but if you look by populations, the west won an “electoral college” victory on the topic.
logicchains 4y ago
>Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. It's about building robust systems. A system that assumes counterparties are trustworthy will fail in the case they aren't (as demonstrated clearly in modern OS/web architecture), whereas a system that assumes counterparties are not trustworthy will not fail in that case. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. This is the same premise as communism and has proven to be a complete failure: it's not possible to change human nature. Even with a massive propaganda and brainwashing apparatus like the Chinese education system.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  I agree that current technical systems must not assume trust, for as long as we have malicious agents. IMO we should not let this be baked into the fabric of human society though. And for the record, I believe it is possible to achieve what I am talking about in conditions and general spirit of market and capitalism. Suppressing personal choice (USSR- and China-style) is not the way to get there, it is in fact the opposite—making people feel psychologically secure enough to not feel compelled to be malicious is one thing; forcing them into constraints that prevent them from being malicious does not solve the issue and only obscures it (and besides, party elites will always be free to be whatever they want). In fact, it is the parallels between blockchain-based social system and some emerging Chinese realities (social karma, etc.) that worry me.
alisonkisk 4y ago
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andyroony 4y ago
fartcannon 4y ago
Bitcoins inception was on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. The genesis block mentions it. What bitcoin enthusiasts don't trust are objectively untrustworthy institutions. That's it. It's real straight forward.
- tonypace 4y ago
  Bitcoin institutions are objectively untrustworthy and most people involved in Bitcoin have no real choice but to rely on them. I trust, say, Citibank more than Bitfinex.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    You dont need bitcoin exchanges.
    - 8organicbits 4y ago
      Given the huge number of people who only transact using exchanges, and the usability improvements of doing so, that may technically be true, but probably isn't too helpful. For most people they are inseparable in practice. Worrying about the trustworthiness of the major bitcoin players is practical.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        Absolutely! Dont trust institutions is the message.
        8organicbits 4y ago
        I suppose that was an original message for Bitcoin, but the current state with various institutions serving in trust-based roles for so many users, Bitcoin doesn't seem to have met that goal. The users who out of practical concern are considering between trusting Citibank and Bitfinex, will benefit from chosing the one that's regulated.
nyolfen 4y ago
you can trust people all you want. take iou's, accept people at their word, etc -- the existence of trustless systems does nothing to negate this. for everyone you don't trust, you can use a blockchain. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. i don't even know what to say when people say things like this. we should strive for good will and cooperation, but we must be prepared for situations where there is none. this is like arguing against allowing people to put locks on doors. when you create situations where distrust is disallowed, defecting becomes the winning strategy.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Have you ever been in places where locking your bike is perceived as a slight sign of disrespect? It is for a good reason; you have basically just labeled all people there as possible thieves. I am not arguing that we metaphorically and literally need to do away with locks right now, but that we can and should apply effort in the direction that makes them obsolete as preventative measures. I want to live in a place where I do not need them. The existence of trustless systems does not make distrust mandatory, it is such systems becoming mandatory that bothers me, as well as the effort spent into developing more and more robust trustless systems—as opposed to trying to make those very systems obsolete by eliminating the underlying motivations that push people to exploit trust.
  - nyolfen 4y ago
    > Have you ever been in places where locking your bike is perceived as a slight sign of disrespect? It is for a good reason; you have basically just labeled all people there as possible thieves. the internet is a single, collapsed point in space. your bike is accessible through this aleph, to all of the most skilled bike thieves in the world, forever. the internet might have been different in the past and may yet be different in the future, but if we are going to have a truly global universally-accessible network, we are going to need systems that are built for an adversarial environment.
    - strogonoff 4y ago
anovikov 4y ago
Maybe this explains to a great degree why so many blockchain big names are Russian speakers! Because in Russia, we see trust as a bug, and any necessity to develop trust to anyone as an obstacle (because we know people really can't be trusted). There are high-trust and low-trust societies out there. Majority of the world lives in low-trust societies and this is culturally, not economically driven, so unlikely to change fast. Globalisation means these people will permeate - through migration too, but mostly, through cross-border economic activities - all high-trust societies, too, so very quickly people who rely on trust and trust others will either be scammed out of all their lives, or resort to a niche role by picking their interacting parties so diligently they will be cut off from most economic and social activity, and become irrelevant. So, for the modern world, trust is a bug indeed (and no i don't think blockchain will help this, or anything at all).
goodpoint 4y ago
> Trust is a feature, not a bug Why do people always misunderstand "trustless"? Being ABLE to trust somebody is a good thing. Being REQUIRED to trust somebody is a problem.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  That argument is not that clear if you state it in the converse. Being able to operate with nobody trusting you is potentially a problem. Being required to be trusted by at least somebody is arguably a good thing.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Being required to be trusted by at least somebody That's in no way related to what I wrote and to the concept of trustless is security.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Let me phrase it this way: “being required to trust somebody” being a problem is the underlying problem. Why are there untrustworthy people in society?
smokey_circles 4y ago
I'm not following. You will not find trust _in people_ anywhere in modern society. Banks certify transactions, governments certify identity. We can go on and on here. Whole swathes of law around this topic too lol (see: fraud). Crypto isn't about not trusting people, it's about not needing to trust strangers. Some of them are scams, ironically, but when there's money involved... well it's pretty stupid to _just_ trust people. Unless I've missed something?
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Trust is everywhere. I eat at a cafe being trusted to pay later. In South Korea, I am trusted to have paid for my ticket upon entering the train (no one ever checked it). I trust every person I stroll past in a dark alley to not rob me at knifepoint. I am trusted by my customers to not deliver a backdoored codebase (yes, there is the letter of the contract, but really it comes down to interpersonal trust since they cannot verify it themselves). Etc., etc.
DennisP 4y ago
Every few months, my credit card blocks one of my purchases because its statistical algorithm decides it looks sketchy and wants me to respond to a verification email. How is this any more trusting? Both systems recognize the existence of fraudulent actors, and handle the problem in different ways. Blockchains use cryptographically-signed transactions, so merchants get no information they can use against you. Credit cards hand your credentials over to every merchant and try to fix their fundamental insecurity by flagging unusual transactions, insuring against losses, and issuing new credentials when bad actors get them (which brings lots of associated hassle, that I've gone through a couple times in the last few years). Bank transfers handle the problem by simply delaying full access to the money, at least for larger amounts, until banks on both ends have checked everything. The same applies to more complex systems. Blockchains try to build systems with extreme transparency and security (and sometimes fail at that). Traditional finance builds systems reliant on centralized actors, and adds lots of regulation, oversight, and incentives such as criminal penalties to keep those actors in check (and sometimes fails at that). We certainly should strive for a more idealistic future. But legacy banking/finance is not doing that. Blockchain platforms at least provide the possibility of building something new that's better; on top of an open trustless platform, you can build your own system assuming whatever level of trust and altruism you like. Two examples on Ethereum: optimistic rollups are more scalable second layers, in which withdrawals work more like bank transfers: withdrawals aren't cryptographically verified, but have a delay during which anyone can submit proof of fraud. A more idealistic example is Gitcoin, in which people donate to public goods and the money is allocated with a quadratic funding system.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  > Bank transfers handle the problem by simply delaying full access to the money, at least for larger amounts, until banks on both ends have checked everything. They are doing it for good reasons, presence of malicious agents (money launderers, etc.) exploiting trust requires it. (In fact, I’d argue banks are getting away with not doing it enough with very moneyed customers.) Blockchain does not eliminate this need in current age—either equivalent institutions would have to be reproduced all anew, or we need to end the motivations that make people want to exploit financial system in the first place. And if we do address the latter (the only sustainable solution in the long run), then what is the benefit of blockchain and all? Isn’t it just pure overhead then?
photochemsyn 4y ago
The reality is that as you move up the social hierarchy in modern human society, trust tends to vanish and is ultimately viewed as something only a rube would rely on. This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? For example, in the upper tiers of corporations all employment is on a contract basis. Nobody at these levels trusts they will be treated fairly and given a severance package if they are fired, without an explicit contract stating the terms and conditions of employment. Contracts are renewed or renegotiated every few years, right? In contrast, entry-level employees never get contracts, they can be fired at will with no warning or severance, at least in the United States where union power is very limited, relative to Europe. Similarly, look at the prevalence of marital contracts that imply a lack of trust among the parties, i.e. the famous pre-nuptial agreement regarding how the net wealth of the couple will be divided up in the event of a divorce. There's a zero-trust situation that's increasingly common. It's true that a society where nobody trusts anyone else and all are suspicious of each other's motives is not a very healthy society, but isn't this also the assumption of the economic theorists who claim all humans are basically little more than rational autonomous self-improving algorithms, with net assets being the benchmark of success?
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? Or it exists so that everyone makes sure that everyone else understands the words/concepts being used in the same way. What does (e.g.) "full payment on final construction" mean? Well, it depends on who you ask. Contracts there to (hopefully) make sure everyone is agreeing to the same transaction.
- hahajk 4y ago
  > This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? When I worked with non-trivial (>$1m) contracts, I learned that the sooner you start pointing to contract language, the sooner the relationship breaks down. “Working with” partners through shortfalls and giving second chances resulted in much more long term success than sticking to the letter of the contract. Part of the reason, I think, is simple human relationship-building. And a big part of that is trust. Trust and credit also play into it directly - the vendor knows we didn’t penalize them when they delivered a feature a month late, so they’re willing to surge when we have a requirement pop up that needs fixing quicker than we agreed to.
mintyDijon 4y ago
>Aren’t we sort of codifying malicious intent, instead of trying to remove it from the equation? Whom would this serve? Define malicious intent. What and whome one person is willing to trust will always be different than another person. This is a hard truth that we will never work around. Culture vs Culture, family vs family, idea vs idea. We can't get rid of conflict or therefore 'malicious intent' and by extension we can't (or shouldn't) bank on trust. I think the better way to deal with our very real human differences is to look past them in the spirit that all of us are creations of a higher power, and thus working together is in everyone's greatest interest. Money as a medium of exchange is a very powerful concept It holds the idea of an IOU that can transcend our differences in the spirit of building a better world. But in order for that to happen money needs to be fungible, else our differences will enviably tear it apart. Perhaps when the dollar was backed by gold this concept was more or less true, but central banks undermined that, hense the pull towards extreme decentralization. >There is place for verification in the interim, such as maintaining security of your home, but if we are looking ahead (as blockchain enthusiasts do) we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. NOT TREATING IT AS SOME SORT OF DEFAULT IS A GOOD START. I must disagree with this concept. To treat it in a trusted manner is to ignore the fact that we have insurmountable differences and therefore those differences will raise their ugly heads elsewhere and tear our hopes for peace apart. Rather to start with the presupposition that these differences exist, but that we will create a form that transcends them for the better of all is imo the ideal.
milkey_mouse 4y ago
> Their core motivation to benefit at others’ expense is to me indicative of mental health issues, possibly caused by insecurity and upbringing trauma. Could we avoid armchair diagnoses? For society to function we need to maintain the polite fiction that one's actions are determined solely by their will.
kwatsonafter 4y ago
It's a symptom of our mentally ill society trying to rationalize why in 2022 we haven't solved a bunch or practical problems and yet every year we get new iterations of the IPhone, AI in cars, new services in apps, ect... We start from an idea that Moore's Law somehow correlates with social progress but I think that tremendously remains to be seen. There's a noted relationship between teen suicides and social media (on phones) and one-for-one computing in education hasn't produced the generation of Einsteins and Mozarts that it thought it might in the 70s and 80s. I think crypto is the human imagination trying to bridge the gap between our social arrangements and technological progress and I think at its core that is a good thing. We need to dream big if we're going to build a livable world but that also requires discipline and that's something we're severely lacking in society. I think there's a sort of person that thinks to themselves, "I want all the benefits of living in an advanced society without actually being obligated to participate in said society." I can't help but think this is a kind of sickness. Self-Determination doesn't necessarily exclude social obligation it only dictates that I might not be tyrannized by these obligations. There's a kind of, "e-person" who is the perfect Cartesian. The new existentialist who reaps the benefits of a globalized society and what is their sacrifice to the world-machine? --Just their continued existence; nothing more. Without being crude we used to call those people tramps until Charlie Chaplin taught us to be nice to poor people.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> Trust is a feature, not a bug. It's a feature of the system, precisely because it replaces trust in shaky institutions. I trust strong cryptography. I don't trust governments not to abuse their power. I don't trust corporations not to maximize profits at our expense. It's really simple. I don't believe in any system that requires trusting either governments or corporations. A good system will necessarily work despite them. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. Not treating it as some sort of default is a good start. Trust is inherently selective and small scale. You trust specific individuals that you personally know, not all of humanity. Even that trust is easily broken. Compare that to modern computer and internet technology where servers are expected to receive input from any other computer on earth. The technological equivalent of children being encouraged to talk to strangers.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  I don’t think we can get rid of locks on our doors (metaphorically and literally) right away, but I do think we should invest more effort into making them obsolete (by raising general well-being, ensuring psychological security; treating people as trustworthy is a factor, since we are primed to behave the way we are perceived) than into making more and more sophisticated locks all around us.

vosper 4y ago

You hit the nail on the head with this comment. And not only is trust a feature, it’s a requirement for society. It’s a deep part of human nature to trust, and trust can’t be removed from how people manage to function in groups.

gitfan86 4y ago
The problem is scale. If society only had 400 people, the 390 people that were not scammers could remove the 10 people who are scammers from their economic system manually. If you create a online store, one million strangers could connect to it. You need a way to understand who is a scammer in that situation.
- headsoup 4y ago
  This is true, and why all political ideologies fail. They can't cater for scale, or when they do, they do so by tyranny, which also fails eventually. Blockchain/Bitcoin has already been thoroughly corrupted, so ironically will prove itself to be entirely untrustworthy before it even gets established as whatever wonderful thing is assumed is still coming from it.
  - fartcannon 4y ago
    Who has bitcoin been corrupted by?
    - headsoup 4y ago
      The exchanges. Clearly and factually.
      - ntoskrnl 4y ago
        If I use my private key to send a transaction to your public key, the exchanges have no say in it. You can choose who to trust. If some exchange is corrupted, just don't use it.
        rglullis 4y ago
        The price of the coin is being manipulated by the exchanges, no matter if you use it or not. One exchange in particular (Bitfinex) is helping to keep the largest fraud scheme in history (Tether/USDT) around.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        I dont understand what you mean. Is there somewhere I can read about this?
        headsoup 4y ago
        For a straightforward start, this guy piles on a bit, but also holds a lot of the history/evidence on record too: https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed https://mobile.twitter.com/Bitfinexed

nverno 4y ago

Everyone is a potential threat, that's the whole point of trust in the first place. If that wasn't the case, trust (in terms of safety) wouldnt even be a thing.

johtso 4y ago
Not if you reframe it as the absence of mistrust, trusting being the natural state.
- nverno 4y ago
  Trusting blindly is not a natural state. We evolved in the ecosystem you see around you. In freak cases, eg. the dodo bird, you can see what happens when blind trust meets competition.
  - headsoup 4y ago
    I think this is why it is problematic these days. Trust in simple terms would be trusting your local community but not the 'outside' world. But now we're trying to make the whole world one community, so who to distrust? Everyone, because you don't actually really know many people at all 'inside' your community. Everyone is inside and outside at once. It feels like blockchain is trying to be a solution for the 'global community' that can't trust itself, but will never solve that problem because it's inherently an unsolvable utopian dream.
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Isn’t it fundamentally an artifact of scarcity? What if with technological advances in automation and energy sources humanity were approaching a world without it?

bawolff 4y ago

I disagree - trust is a bug in technical systems. Maintaining trust has a really high cost and is an obvious and common single point of failure. Take TLS - wouldn't it be nice if we could have the same system without certificate authorities? The thing is - like everything else, trust is a tradeoff. Bitcoin folks will discard it at any cost. Sometimes discarding it is not worth the cost. That doesn't mean adding trusted third parties is a good thing, just that it is often the lesser evil.

atoav 4y ago
The thing is, it is not always a bug and it does not always help to give the decision out of your own hands. E.g. I would really trust myself to decide which products should stay in my Online Shop and which I want out. I don't need (or even want) a public append-only structure that is out of my control. For me the blockchain is good for all usecases where I would in real life use a notary. And that is not many use cases.
hgomersall 4y ago
But even with Bitcoin you're super reliant on trust in (a) the technology not to be broken or compromised and (b) the system that supports the actual world outside of crypto (i.e. actual resources that matter).
strogonoff 4y ago
But that is in technical systems. More or less it’s an equivalent of defending your home, or using password auth: there are humans motivated to increase their well-being at your expense (at the expense of the environment, and so on). This tech seems often to be pushed onto human society as a whole, though. It’s like giving up on solving the underlying issues that give humans the above-mentioned motivation to betray each other, and instead baking into the fabric society an assumption that it’s human nature to be this way.
- snikeris 4y ago
  The tech (money) has already been adopted by human society as a whole though. So it's not about pushing tech onto human society, but upgrading the existing tech. > It’s like giving up on solving the underlying issues that give humans the above-mentioned motivation to betray each other, and instead baking into the fabric society an assumption that it’s human nature to be this way. Not all humans are that way, but those who desire power tend to be. I simply don't trust those in power to manage the money properly. It's too much power for anyone to wield. This is not theory; the historical record is damning for fiat money. Also, as the world has become more globalized, a world reserve currency has emerged. It makes trade easier if everyone has $USD on hand. However, other countries shouldn't have to trust in the good faith in the U.S. government just to engage in global commerce.

noduerme 4y ago

You're right on a lot of things here, (I appreciate the slightly humorous, gratuitous take on bad actors having had a bad upbringing) but you seem to be inverting the flaws in the no-trust paradigm into a trust-but-verify paradigm based on an assumption of implicit goodness which is no more borne out by reality than the assumption of implicit evil. Maybe it makes more sense to look at it all through a different lens. Classical, post-mercantile liberal economics, - that is, liberalism - is entirely built around a framework for dealing with the question of establishing trust between parties: Individuals do not have to establish trust, or agree with each other, or be friends, if they certify that they acquiesce to a system where the market is well regulated. In exchange they get the advantage of being in a market where trade can be a non-zero game that advantages both parties. The problem with crypto as it stands has something to do with unregulated markets, something to do with bad actors, but a lot more to do with the fact that no one has yet come up with a use for deflationary currency that's something other than a zero-sum game.

strogonoff 4y ago
I need time to digest your point, but one note—participants certifying acquiescence to the system still involves trust: as in, you agree to the rules of this mini-game, but I trust that you actually follow them. I suspect that such default meta-trust is sort of important, like presumption of innocence; and if there are people who violate it, then we should throw more resources at treating the underlying causes rather than eliminating symptoms. So far blockchain-based trustless tech to me seems instrumental at treating the symptom only (and I can see how it detracts resources from treating the cause), thus I am wary of it.

xorcist 4y ago

While certainly not wanting to ruing the humorous undertones here, just for the benefit of other readers it's important to point out that the lack of third party trust has a very specific meaning. Take for web for example. It is trustless in the same manner. There is no third party (apart from the web browser and the server) that you need to trust in order for you to view a web page. There is no International Web Organization that you need to procure permission from in order to set up a web server. You just start it. (And, conversely, also why so much bad actors exist on the web.) This is fundamentally a different system than for example all economic transactions, apart from cash. This is why some people argues against the cashless society for not being trustless, and also what the people who experiment with private monetary systems study.

tlarkworthy 4y ago
Web is not trustless DNS is part of the web and it is a federated/heirarchical 3rd party trust model you need to route your named traffic to the right server, often managed by states. It's super important to understand, this is why authoritarian governments can still hide what citizens can experience on the internet
qsdf38100 4y ago
Certificates are required pretty much for any websites nowadays. IIRC it has to do with TLS, so basically all https websites. Those certificates are ultimately based on a trusted third party. So web is not trustless, not even close.

rglullis 4y ago

> The problem with blockchainers It's hard to take any of what you say seriously when you start a comment with such a blanket statement. Also, I think I've already seen your type of "argument" so many times, I think I am able to just play the whole tape by just pointing out to previous comments I've made: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195939 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31545427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31545427 (trustlessness is not about "eliminating trust") - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31463534 (Yeah, you are right that there is no such thing as an "ideal" world. What you are missing is that also applies to the anti-crypto mentality, who think that just because they were born in a place with functional institutions, they think that is the natural state of things. It's good when institutions work, but they are not perfect and we need to prepared for the times when they fail.)

JohnHaugeland 4y ago
It's easy enough to have a discussion about you which you don't take seriously An anti-vaxxer might respond the same way to "the problem with anti-vaxxers," hoping to make sure that nobody discusses the very real problems with them It's generally okay if people being criticized don't want the people speaking about them to think poorly of them. It's generally okay if a person being criticized believes that what's said to them can be rebuffed with canned content. You go ahead and tell everyone that the reason you're polluting with a dysfunctional casino is "you weren't born with functional institutions" if you like Every notice how anti-vaxxers have canned responses that they think landed, but nobody else does?
- rglullis 4y ago
  Did you notice your rhetoric is so poor that you could not address any actual argument? You did nothing except (a) resorting to throw false accusations hoping that this is enough to discredit your "opponent" and (b) "othering" via an absurd analogy? If you only tried to reason properly and read at least part of what has been discussed before, you'd find out that: - I am not in favor of BTC. I think it worked as a proof-of-concept for a system to transfer value without intermediaries, but it has failed as a currency - no privacy, too expensive, too volatile and its fixed supply makes it unworkable as money. - I am not in favor of PoW. There are cheaper and more efficient ways to secure a blockchain and we are close to make a switch. - I am not in favor of all these token projects that create opportunities for speculation but are not connected to real economic activity. My "thing" is using crypto for payments and small-scale banking as an alternative for the global financial system [0]. So, unless you think that the status quo is "good", you will have a better shot at changing my mind if you show me a superior solution to the problem we are trying to tackle. Trying to dismiss me and my work with self-righteous, sophomoric rhetoric does not help anyone and does not solve anything. [0]: https://hub20.io/about https://hub20.io/about

delusional 4y ago

I agree. Trust is fundamental to human society, and without it we can't function. No matter how many fancy technological solutions you layer on top. I think there's a deeper problem that you're ignoring. The desire for trustless systems didn't materialize out of nothing, as has been pointed out many times in the cryptocurrency discussion space. Some of it is surely coming from a libertarian angle of absolute personal freedom to avoid the "unfair" regulation from the government, to avoid the compulsions the state imposes on each of us in order to grant us the rights it does. I think that's a very small part of it though. I think most of the desire for "zero-trust" comes from a disillusion of the current parties seen as trusted. I can at least say that this is what drives the desire within me. It's very hard to see the fairness in paying taxes when I see the people labeled the most trustworthy abuse the system to hide money in tax havens all while using their entrusted positions to lead the economy of the world into an ever deepening hole. When we see the actors labeled "trustworthy" acting maliciously, it becomes hard to trust the system that calls them "trustworthy". I go to work every day where I'm asked to ignore my own instincts and instead do whatever some faceless "process" claims is the right thing to work on. I'm asked to ignore the horrible state of our products and instead focus on the massive piles of money we shovel in the door from out entrusted position as a financial institution. Meanwhile I can turn on the TV to see the very same people talk about how they just couldn't have known that billions were being stolen from my government because it's just so hard to be a bank. That shit does stuff to your trust in other people and I'm not alone in that disillusionment. In that light I think the discussion makes much more sense, even if it doesn't make it any more helpful. Trust is still important, but the current method of obtaining trust, and the by extension people we imbue with it, is broken. For someone in the middle of that, it becomes very logical to discard the whole thing like a junior rewriting a legacy business app.

strogonoff 4y ago
I heard the opinion where people don’t want to pay taxes that they don’t think do something good, and because the government can freeze their accounts if they don’t pay then they believe it’s unfair. Presumably, there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom, due to the presence of the aforementioned malicious actors. So I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart—and whom hopefully one voted for, directly or not—have struggled with it and arrived at a solution that works? And if one legitimately thinks it’s a bad solution and cares enough about it, why not attempt to fix it instead? Is this a failure of democracy? Could it be that it moves too slowly for the modern age? Or is there a belief in some underlying conspiracy due to which democracy is not a democracy and no change is possible? Regarding rogue agents exploiting the system to avoid paying taxes, I don’t think should be a factor that affects my decision on whether I should pay taxes (like what a criminal does shouldn’t be my guiding principle). What I would agree on is that there’re people incentivised to attempt to benefit at someone else’s cost, and that those people exist everywhere including corporations, institutions, and the government. I’d also agree that, regarding government specifically, it’s worse because such malicious actors are incentivised to actively seek power because power converts to money very well. It’s a truly regrettable state of affair, because government corruption leads to corruption elsewhere. I think part of the issue is democracies being liable to be influenced by kleptocracies in other countries, who funnel unjustly extracted money into Western economies much to the benefit of individuals at the receiving end. I just don’t think this can be solved technically, we either work on people not being jerks or we will have them find ways to be jerks regardless of any checks, barring complete thought control and predictive crime enforcement dystopia. --- As another analogy, it’s like a distinction between the spirit and the letter. The spirit is the guiding principle, and the letter is a lossy way to express it. Automatic conversion between the spirit and a letter is not possible: this is a philosophical issue adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness; one human not being able to convey to another human the entirety of what they think or feel, words being always interpreted through another mind’s lens. Whether the letter can be expressed on paper or as a smart contract, the letter is never going to be equal fidelity to that of the spirit, and for understandable reasons (such as “fallible humans have written it”) should never have precedence over the spirit. So I wish we invested the effort that goes into inventing higher and higher fidelity letters into, say, alleviating whatever pushes people to violate the spirit in the first place. It’s a much more complex meatspace problem, though.

k__ 4y ago

Don't know what people you talked to, but I'm active in one of the biggest DAOs for 10 months and it's 99% about trust.

kibwen 4y ago

Even without considering the social benefits of trust, from an economic perspective, trust is often enormously, ridiculously efficient compared to distrust. If I need to borrow my neighbor's weed whacker, I don't need to determine its value (plus interest and opportunity cost) and write up a contract and register collateral on the world's slowest and least efficient database, I can just say, hey, mind if I borrow this? Trust and reputation are force multipliers.

pibechorro 4y ago
Slowest and least efficient.. you realize some blockchains update in seconds? For a low value proposition like borrowing a lawnmower you dont need the most secure public network on earth to do it. You use the right blocchain for the right applications. The problem with trust, is that its awesome until it aint. When we are deaing with gov policy, billions of dollars, war, your life savings,etc a break in trust is beyond costly, making the use cost of a slower but secure blockchain the responsible thing to do.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  So war on the blockchain? That sounds like a good example of what is meant by "dystopian." Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain. It's like you took democracy, but got rid of the elements of constitutional republicanism that mitigate the weaknesses of democracy, leaving only the weaknesses. Except not really, because that would be a plain tyranny of the majority of unique human persons and this is a tyranny of a majority of wealth, which may only be a tiny number of people. I guess it's more like returning to feudalism, except the lords and kings no longer have to raise armies and fight each other. The richest coalition just wins automatically.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain. Actully, this is basically what’s happening in your example. The citizens of the wealthiest countries are participating in the war by sending armaments and aid to Ukraine. The majority of the world’s citizens* are sitting it out or providing some amount of assistance to the Russian side, mainly through commerce. It’s not on the blockchain, but essentially wealth is “voting”. FWIW I’m far, far from being a blockchain supporter. I’m just addressing your example. * yes, at the UN the majority states voted against Russia, but if you look by populations, the west won an “electoral college” victory on the topic.

logicchains 4y ago

>Trust is a feature, not a bug. If trust is violated by rogue agents, it is because they exist[0], not because trust itself is a folly. It's about building robust systems. A system that assumes counterparties are trustworthy will fail in the case they aren't (as demonstrated clearly in modern OS/web architecture), whereas a system that assumes counterparties are not trustworthy will not fail in that case. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. This is the same premise as communism and has proven to be a complete failure: it's not possible to change human nature. Even with a massive propaganda and brainwashing apparatus like the Chinese education system.

strogonoff 4y ago
I agree that current technical systems must not assume trust, for as long as we have malicious agents. IMO we should not let this be baked into the fabric of human society though. And for the record, I believe it is possible to achieve what I am talking about in conditions and general spirit of market and capitalism. Suppressing personal choice (USSR- and China-style) is not the way to get there, it is in fact the opposite—making people feel psychologically secure enough to not feel compelled to be malicious is one thing; forcing them into constraints that prevent them from being malicious does not solve the issue and only obscures it (and besides, party elites will always be free to be whatever they want). In fact, it is the parallels between blockchain-based social system and some emerging Chinese realities (social karma, etc.) that worry me.

alisonkisk 4y ago

[dead]

andyroony 4y ago

fartcannon 4y ago

Bitcoins inception was on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. The genesis block mentions it. What bitcoin enthusiasts don't trust are objectively untrustworthy institutions. That's it. It's real straight forward.

tonypace 4y ago
Bitcoin institutions are objectively untrustworthy and most people involved in Bitcoin have no real choice but to rely on them. I trust, say, Citibank more than Bitfinex.
- fartcannon 4y ago
  You dont need bitcoin exchanges.
  - 8organicbits 4y ago
    Given the huge number of people who only transact using exchanges, and the usability improvements of doing so, that may technically be true, but probably isn't too helpful. For most people they are inseparable in practice. Worrying about the trustworthiness of the major bitcoin players is practical.
    - fartcannon 4y ago
      Absolutely! Dont trust institutions is the message.
      - 8organicbits 4y ago
        I suppose that was an original message for Bitcoin, but the current state with various institutions serving in trust-based roles for so many users, Bitcoin doesn't seem to have met that goal. The users who out of practical concern are considering between trusting Citibank and Bitfinex, will benefit from chosing the one that's regulated.

nyolfen 4y ago

you can trust people all you want. take iou's, accept people at their word, etc -- the existence of trustless systems does nothing to negate this. for everyone you don't trust, you can use a blockchain. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. i don't even know what to say when people say things like this. we should strive for good will and cooperation, but we must be prepared for situations where there is none. this is like arguing against allowing people to put locks on doors. when you create situations where distrust is disallowed, defecting becomes the winning strategy.

strogonoff 4y ago
Have you ever been in places where locking your bike is perceived as a slight sign of disrespect? It is for a good reason; you have basically just labeled all people there as possible thieves. I am not arguing that we metaphorically and literally need to do away with locks right now, but that we can and should apply effort in the direction that makes them obsolete as preventative measures. I want to live in a place where I do not need them. The existence of trustless systems does not make distrust mandatory, it is such systems becoming mandatory that bothers me, as well as the effort spent into developing more and more robust trustless systems—as opposed to trying to make those very systems obsolete by eliminating the underlying motivations that push people to exploit trust.
- nyolfen 4y ago
  > Have you ever been in places where locking your bike is perceived as a slight sign of disrespect? It is for a good reason; you have basically just labeled all people there as possible thieves. the internet is a single, collapsed point in space. your bike is accessible through this aleph, to all of the most skilled bike thieves in the world, forever. the internet might have been different in the past and may yet be different in the future, but if we are going to have a truly global universally-accessible network, we are going to need systems that are built for an adversarial environment.
  - strogonoff 4y ago

anovikov 4y ago

Maybe this explains to a great degree why so many blockchain big names are Russian speakers! Because in Russia, we see trust as a bug, and any necessity to develop trust to anyone as an obstacle (because we know people really can't be trusted). There are high-trust and low-trust societies out there. Majority of the world lives in low-trust societies and this is culturally, not economically driven, so unlikely to change fast. Globalisation means these people will permeate - through migration too, but mostly, through cross-border economic activities - all high-trust societies, too, so very quickly people who rely on trust and trust others will either be scammed out of all their lives, or resort to a niche role by picking their interacting parties so diligently they will be cut off from most economic and social activity, and become irrelevant. So, for the modern world, trust is a bug indeed (and no i don't think blockchain will help this, or anything at all).

goodpoint 4y ago

> Trust is a feature, not a bug Why do people always misunderstand "trustless"? Being ABLE to trust somebody is a good thing. Being REQUIRED to trust somebody is a problem.

Mordisquitos 4y ago
That argument is not that clear if you state it in the converse. Being able to operate with nobody trusting you is potentially a problem. Being required to be trusted by at least somebody is arguably a good thing.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > Being required to be trusted by at least somebody That's in no way related to what I wrote and to the concept of trustless is security.
strogonoff 4y ago
Let me phrase it this way: “being required to trust somebody” being a problem is the underlying problem. Why are there untrustworthy people in society?

smokey_circles 4y ago

I'm not following. You will not find trust _in people_ anywhere in modern society. Banks certify transactions, governments certify identity. We can go on and on here. Whole swathes of law around this topic too lol (see: fraud). Crypto isn't about not trusting people, it's about not needing to trust strangers. Some of them are scams, ironically, but when there's money involved... well it's pretty stupid to _just_ trust people. Unless I've missed something?

strogonoff 4y ago
Trust is everywhere. I eat at a cafe being trusted to pay later. In South Korea, I am trusted to have paid for my ticket upon entering the train (no one ever checked it). I trust every person I stroll past in a dark alley to not rob me at knifepoint. I am trusted by my customers to not deliver a backdoored codebase (yes, there is the letter of the contract, but really it comes down to interpersonal trust since they cannot verify it themselves). Etc., etc.

DennisP 4y ago

Every few months, my credit card blocks one of my purchases because its statistical algorithm decides it looks sketchy and wants me to respond to a verification email. How is this any more trusting? Both systems recognize the existence of fraudulent actors, and handle the problem in different ways. Blockchains use cryptographically-signed transactions, so merchants get no information they can use against you. Credit cards hand your credentials over to every merchant and try to fix their fundamental insecurity by flagging unusual transactions, insuring against losses, and issuing new credentials when bad actors get them (which brings lots of associated hassle, that I've gone through a couple times in the last few years). Bank transfers handle the problem by simply delaying full access to the money, at least for larger amounts, until banks on both ends have checked everything. The same applies to more complex systems. Blockchains try to build systems with extreme transparency and security (and sometimes fail at that). Traditional finance builds systems reliant on centralized actors, and adds lots of regulation, oversight, and incentives such as criminal penalties to keep those actors in check (and sometimes fails at that). We certainly should strive for a more idealistic future. But legacy banking/finance is not doing that. Blockchain platforms at least provide the possibility of building something new that's better; on top of an open trustless platform, you can build your own system assuming whatever level of trust and altruism you like. Two examples on Ethereum: optimistic rollups are more scalable second layers, in which withdrawals work more like bank transfers: withdrawals aren't cryptographically verified, but have a delay during which anyone can submit proof of fraud. A more idealistic example is Gitcoin, in which people donate to public goods and the money is allocated with a quadratic funding system.

strogonoff 4y ago
> Bank transfers handle the problem by simply delaying full access to the money, at least for larger amounts, until banks on both ends have checked everything. They are doing it for good reasons, presence of malicious agents (money launderers, etc.) exploiting trust requires it. (In fact, I’d argue banks are getting away with not doing it enough with very moneyed customers.) Blockchain does not eliminate this need in current age—either equivalent institutions would have to be reproduced all anew, or we need to end the motivations that make people want to exploit financial system in the first place. And if we do address the latter (the only sustainable solution in the long run), then what is the benefit of blockchain and all? Isn’t it just pure overhead then?

photochemsyn 4y ago

The reality is that as you move up the social hierarchy in modern human society, trust tends to vanish and is ultimately viewed as something only a rube would rely on. This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? For example, in the upper tiers of corporations all employment is on a contract basis. Nobody at these levels trusts they will be treated fairly and given a severance package if they are fired, without an explicit contract stating the terms and conditions of employment. Contracts are renewed or renegotiated every few years, right? In contrast, entry-level employees never get contracts, they can be fired at will with no warning or severance, at least in the United States where union power is very limited, relative to Europe. Similarly, look at the prevalence of marital contracts that imply a lack of trust among the parties, i.e. the famous pre-nuptial agreement regarding how the net wealth of the couple will be divided up in the event of a divorce. There's a zero-trust situation that's increasingly common. It's true that a society where nobody trusts anyone else and all are suspicious of each other's motives is not a very healthy society, but isn't this also the assumption of the economic theorists who claim all humans are basically little more than rational autonomous self-improving algorithms, with net assets being the benchmark of success?

throw0101a 4y ago
> This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? Or it exists so that everyone makes sure that everyone else understands the words/concepts being used in the same way. What does (e.g.) "full payment on final construction" mean? Well, it depends on who you ask. Contracts there to (hopefully) make sure everyone is agreeing to the same transaction.
hahajk 4y ago
> This is why contract law exists, doesn't it? When I worked with non-trivial (>$1m) contracts, I learned that the sooner you start pointing to contract language, the sooner the relationship breaks down. “Working with” partners through shortfalls and giving second chances resulted in much more long term success than sticking to the letter of the contract. Part of the reason, I think, is simple human relationship-building. And a big part of that is trust. Trust and credit also play into it directly - the vendor knows we didn’t penalize them when they delivered a feature a month late, so they’re willing to surge when we have a requirement pop up that needs fixing quicker than we agreed to.

mintyDijon 4y ago

>Aren’t we sort of codifying malicious intent, instead of trying to remove it from the equation? Whom would this serve? Define malicious intent. What and whome one person is willing to trust will always be different than another person. This is a hard truth that we will never work around. Culture vs Culture, family vs family, idea vs idea. We can't get rid of conflict or therefore 'malicious intent' and by extension we can't (or shouldn't) bank on trust. I think the better way to deal with our very real human differences is to look past them in the spirit that all of us are creations of a higher power, and thus working together is in everyone's greatest interest. Money as a medium of exchange is a very powerful concept It holds the idea of an IOU that can transcend our differences in the spirit of building a better world. But in order for that to happen money needs to be fungible, else our differences will enviably tear it apart. Perhaps when the dollar was backed by gold this concept was more or less true, but central banks undermined that, hense the pull towards extreme decentralization. >There is place for verification in the interim, such as maintaining security of your home, but if we are looking ahead (as blockchain enthusiasts do) we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. NOT TREATING IT AS SOME SORT OF DEFAULT IS A GOOD START. I must disagree with this concept. To treat it in a trusted manner is to ignore the fact that we have insurmountable differences and therefore those differences will raise their ugly heads elsewhere and tear our hopes for peace apart. Rather to start with the presupposition that these differences exist, but that we will create a form that transcends them for the better of all is imo the ideal.

milkey_mouse 4y ago

> Their core motivation to benefit at others’ expense is to me indicative of mental health issues, possibly caused by insecurity and upbringing trauma. Could we avoid armchair diagnoses? For society to function we need to maintain the polite fiction that one's actions are determined solely by their will.

kwatsonafter 4y ago

It's a symptom of our mentally ill society trying to rationalize why in 2022 we haven't solved a bunch or practical problems and yet every year we get new iterations of the IPhone, AI in cars, new services in apps, ect... We start from an idea that Moore's Law somehow correlates with social progress but I think that tremendously remains to be seen. There's a noted relationship between teen suicides and social media (on phones) and one-for-one computing in education hasn't produced the generation of Einsteins and Mozarts that it thought it might in the 70s and 80s. I think crypto is the human imagination trying to bridge the gap between our social arrangements and technological progress and I think at its core that is a good thing. We need to dream big if we're going to build a livable world but that also requires discipline and that's something we're severely lacking in society. I think there's a sort of person that thinks to themselves, "I want all the benefits of living in an advanced society without actually being obligated to participate in said society." I can't help but think this is a kind of sickness. Self-Determination doesn't necessarily exclude social obligation it only dictates that I might not be tyrannized by these obligations. There's a kind of, "e-person" who is the perfect Cartesian. The new existentialist who reaps the benefits of a globalized society and what is their sacrifice to the world-machine? --Just their continued existence; nothing more. Without being crude we used to call those people tramps until Charlie Chaplin taught us to be nice to poor people.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> Trust is a feature, not a bug. It's a feature of the system, precisely because it replaces trust in shaky institutions. I trust strong cryptography. I don't trust governments not to abuse their power. I don't trust corporations not to maximize profits at our expense. It's really simple. I don't believe in any system that requires trusting either governments or corporations. A good system will necessarily work despite them. > we should strive for a future where humans are not motivated to hurt other humans. Not treating it as some sort of default is a good start. Trust is inherently selective and small scale. You trust specific individuals that you personally know, not all of humanity. Even that trust is easily broken. Compare that to modern computer and internet technology where servers are expected to receive input from any other computer on earth. The technological equivalent of children being encouraged to talk to strangers.

strogonoff 4y ago
I don’t think we can get rid of locks on our doors (metaphorically and literally) right away, but I do think we should invest more effort into making them obsolete (by raising general well-being, ensuring psychological security; treating people as trustworthy is a factor, since we are primed to behave the way we are perceived) than into making more and more sophisticated locks all around us.