Distributed Trust: The Future of Crowds & Honesty

If decentralized identity were widely adopted, people would be able to carry their full selves with them as they traverse cyberspace: their affinities and experiences reflected by what they’ve created, contributed to, earned, and owned online, no matter the specific platform. This would bring us closer to how things work in the physical world, wher... See more

In the past, trust was purely social (think the caveman days). Then it switched to trusted institutions (banks, governments, companies) which was a step up, but we still had to rely on the other parties goodwill, or their incentive to behave in the right way.
The problem today is that institutions have become the sole gatekeepers of trust. We are st

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We are at the start of the third, biggest trust revolution in the history of humankind. A trust shift does not mean that the previous forms will completely be superseded, only that the new form will become more dominant. The first phase was local trust, where it was based on one-to-one interactions and personal reputation. Next came institutional t... See more

And, through programmable trust, cryptonetworks stand to enable human cooperation at a scale that is completely unprecedented. Trust is becoming unbundled, decentralized, and inverted –– instead of flowing top down from institutions to individual people, it is now beginning to emerge bottom up from individuals and software.