Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
Arthur Weasley (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)
I’ve recently read a blog post by Basecamp’s co-founder David Hansson titled ‘A world without trust is not better’ in which he argues that the trustlessness enabled by blockchain networks is a bad thing. That got me thinking on why blockchain was originally designed to be trustless and what kinds of problems it is in fact trying to solve.
I was born and raised in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas Gerais, on the Brazilian Southeast. Why am I telling you this? Because BH (or Belzonte, as we locals refer to the city) is smack in the center of one of the largest deposits of iron ore in the country (and Brazil has the second largest iron ore reserves in the world) , which means that local government and corporations are very much in bed with each other, oftentimes to the detriment of the population and the environment.
It also means that it is home to many social movements that fight to hold back some of the most damaging actions by the mining companies, pressuring local, state and national legislatures and executive branches to protect these threatened biomes and communities.
All of this is to make a point on how I came to believe that it is not wise to believe, on the one hand, that ellected officials and industry moguls have the population’s best interests at heart - despite what they might say - and on the other that common citizens are unable to do anything about it. It opened my eyes to what an organized society, although with much effort, can accomplish, and to the importance of distributed communication and decision-making.
And these characteristics, namely decentralization, and transparency are a core part of the appeal of blockchain technologies, as well as that promise of trustworthy trustless networks. What else could we accomplish if only we could scale these actions with the help of such technology?
And that brings me to my second point, which is how powerful technology is, and how it is increasingly in the center of our most important decisions as a society. If once the internet was a wild wild west, ripe for the taking (and that very much includes all the problematic implications of this hostile takeover of traditional comunities and their territories), its tremendous power is now held tight on the clutches of just a few giants, such as Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. If on the one hand, it is easier than ever before to learn how to code (if at all) and build your own app, (or software, script, bot or whatever we want, really), on the other we are more and more conditioned to fall back to the same few ’essential’ services, which are increasingly being merged into chimaeric social media superapps.
Once again, centralization and the blurred lines of corporations, society and governments rears its ugly head, and for me the solution is, as has ever been, the constant empowerment of individuals. Critical thinking, decentralized decision-making and governance, free access to information, all of that is essential if we are to avoid the lure of populist solutions, that can so easily culminate in a messianic cult of personality that brings out the worst in all of us.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to explore further into these themes of trust, trustlessness, society, economy and governance, and how blockchain can help or hinder us in our quest for a more just and free society. I will do so over a series of posts, and a tentative outline (which will be updated as work progresses) follows:
Prologue: Why should (or shouldn’t) blockchain be trustless? Intro and motivation for this series
Part 1: A person who trusts no one cannot be trusted. Societal and economical significance of trust
Part 2: Trust, but verify. Trust-based transactions, modern fiat currencies and debt-based trust economies
Part 3: I have a plan. You just have to trust me. The great 2008 crash, the bizantine generals problem and why we might want to not have to trust everybody
Part 4: All people having power ought to be mistrusted. Trustlessness, pseudoanonimity and cryptography, transparency versus privacy
If you held out so far, thank you and I hope you that if you choose to join me on this exploration it just might help you think a bit more about these issues. Onwards!