TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology

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.

What is happening to the relationship between trust and money? If you think about trust being a confident relationship with the unknown and you think about situations in context; whether it's high trust where you don't need to know what that person is doing or how that systems works, I struggle with this idea that through blockchain and increased t... 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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By using blockchains as our underlying assurance mechanism, we can codify organizational governance through code and not purely documented principles that rely on humans to coordinate around. In doing so, we foster greater trust between parties by minimizing trust in people and maximizing trust in technology.

As we build new kinds of organizations, we also need to dispense with the illusion that we’re departing entirely from the past: just because we’re dealing with crypto ledgers doesn’t mean we don’t need to have institutions anymore or that humans don’t have to trust each other anymore. I think that evidence is very strong from our experience that wh... See more

One thing that has always felt strange to me about the cryptocurrency world is the lack of attention to the client/server interface. When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those... See more

At a fundamental level, blockchain networks and smart contract protocols enable technical decentralization. But they can also be designed in a manner that promotes both economic and legal decentralization as well, including:-by enabling transparency — for example, anyone can currently view where the most digital assets have been deposited-by being ... See more