trust

“If you do not trust life to unfold, the mind takes over and it becomes a game of strategy, motivated by anxiety. This mistrust is unfair. Life has given us so much, and yet we do not trust it.”

— Mooji

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 can’t say “no” easily, you can’t be trusted.

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.