Rediscovering trust

Polynya
1 min readJan 10, 2022

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Trust is a powerful feature, not a bug. It’s one of the fundamental tenets behind our species’ wild success. Some crypto utopians may argue for a 100% trustless future, but there are two significant issues with this: a) there’s always weak trust involved, even in Bitcoin; and b) trust is simply most efficient. While there’s always a niche who would want a fully trustless solution, 99% people would prefer to use services they trust that also happen to be more convenient. Proficient intermediaries are an important part of society.

The problem space, therefore, is not to eliminate trust — but to fix it. Sometimes, our methods of coordination leapfrog our trust systems, and that’s what we have seen happen with “web2”. The tempting solution would be to be a contrarian and remove all trust. But the correct approach should be to leverage trust where it works best, and minimize it in problematic situations.

That’s all, just a quick 2 minute totally random rant!

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Polynya
Polynya

Written by Polynya

Rants and musings on blockchain tech. All content here in the public domain, please feel free to share/adapt/republish.

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