You should design trust infrastructure

trust infrastructure is perhaps our only answer to creating an expressive and liberal internet that achieves the same goals of illiberal social credit systems without creating a Google Internet Corp. that controls the entire web.

If you want to fix the web, don’t just ameliorate its symptoms. Instead, transplant another dimension onto the web. Extend the internet right out of your screen and into the rich cacophony of our shared world, with the new dimension of trust.

Today I’ll introduce blockchain as a machine for creating credible commitments . That is, blockchain is a tool for strangers (and indeed nemeses) to make particular representations and commitments to future condition-sensitive action in a trustless way. A blockchain is a tool for enforceable, programmable promises. If this looks similar to contract... See more

all the above “tools”, including (i) shared culture (ii) contract law (iii) markets and (iv) TTPs should all fall under the moniker of “trust infrastructure”. It’s just that in the case of contract law, markets and TTPs, these tools build trustless relationships that make human cooperation scalable beyond our local communities.

Thankfully humans have invented a whole infrastructure for nemeses to cooperate - we call it contract law. Contracts make it possible for enemies to interact in a predictable, rule-based way, where the representations and commitments of each party in a contract are enforced by powerful institutions.

Religion is a particularly scalable form of culture, which was arguably the thing thatmade it possible to interact and transact with (i.e. trust) other people far beyond your local community. When you can presuppose that a stranger shares your basic understanding of the world and a foundational moral code, trust is much easier.