Even without considering the social benefits of trust, from an economic perspective, trust is often enormously, ridiculously efficient compared to distrust. If I need to borrow my neighbor's weed whacker, I don't need to determine its value (plus interest and opportunity cost) and write up a contract and register collateral on the world's slowest and least efficient database, I can just say, hey, mind if I borrow this? Trust and reputation are force multipliers.
Trust is an ideal to strive towards but the unfortunate case is that its reliability quickly starts to strain with scale. I'd argue the economy at large is held together not by trust but by reputation, curation, regulation and threat of lawsuits and jail time. With the last concentrating trust in legal institutions, overall reducing trust burden.
In many countries, the richest companies operate unethically, with impunity because the legal system is in the pocket of a corrupt few in power. In such countries trust in institutions is nonexistent. In developed economies, regulatory capture still leads to inequities and gross inefficiencies.
Today on the internet, reviews and product search results can no longer be trusted. For a very long while, buying from a large class of products on Amazon was a gamble. A breakdown in reputation and curation.
Computing environments were originally high trust, a property they could not retain at scale. Encryption, https everywhere, anti-ad tracking, secure VMs, gated app stores, "Don't trust the client" designs, onion routers, anti binary blobs are technologies and principles which reduce the need for trust. Technologies like DRM, copy protection rootkits and Trusted Computing are corporations communicating their lack of trust in humans inhumanly.
There's always some minimal amount of trust necessary. The optimal minimum generally decreases with scale. Hawala might seem an exception but closer inspection shows it depends on shared belief systems, local interactions on reputation networks and honor; memes which reduce trust burden at scale.
I'd also argue bitcoin isn't about trust but about issues which arise with open permissions and no centralized enforcement mechanism. Its throughput issues addressed by "layer 2" solutions, as decentralized credit networks (from a dispute and authority perspective), actually have fair overlap with honor based informal money transfer systems but without the centuries to have ironed out issues.
Then the solution is clearly to reduce scale where possible.
Many of the things that scale is being forced into don't actually increase their net benefit to the people with scale (usually it is the opposite when you consider the requisite slavery/coups/wars/etc. to provide the infrastructure and labour), merely the amount that can be extracted by some centralized entity.
Now, let's say that you have a car that you'd like to put in a "social car-sharing app." Those participating get an opportunity to make some money, those without cars would benefit from having an increased supply, and your city would benefit because that would mean that the increased utilization of the car fleet would lead to less parking spaces being needed.
Question: how would you do that without rent-extracting middlemen? And even if you are willing to accept a middlemen, why do you think this type of service is not available today? Assume that all the legal barriers for it could be removed - your insurance policy gives you exemption to this and you can have a standard contract defining what would happen in case someone driving your car got involved in an accident, or if you car got stolen by a driver, etc.
If you think that doing that with a car is too complicated, or if you are a cycling advocate: same thing, but for bikes.
Just to make my point explicit: the idea of "trustlessness" is not to get rid of the "trust" in the existing activities that can be handled at the local/"human" scale. The idea is to be able to enable these kind of activities at the higher levels that the institutions (formal or informal) can not cover. If there are things that we can do without a blockchain, great! But think of all the applications that can not be done at all today just because we don't have the tools to enforce the "rules" at a larger scale.
How do you deal with a dispute about a messy car? Or if the car pickup had no gas? Or a disputed theft of personal possessions?
Middleman add value by dealing with edge cases and aggregating trust. They aren’t pure rent extractors.
We had hyper well defined ride sharing system with clear rules unbiased rules, high anonymity, focused on individual providers prior to Uber and Lyft- Taxis. People hated it, as it was rife with little abuses. Uber, Lyft, and similar provide a ton of value by brokering trust between the provider and rider.
Up until 4 years ago, there was no practical way to have a money exchange without a middleman. Today we have all the Uniswap-style decentralized exchange who makes more transaction volume than all of the other centralized exchanges, and do it without wash trading, and no operator can steal or embezzle the funds.
To get this, all it was needed was to have a protocol, namely the Automatic Market Maker system popularized by Uniswap.
Protocol is what we need, not platforms.
One protocol being developed to deal with conflict resolution is https://kleros.io. A decentralized car sharing company could work initially just like a regular car-rental company, by having the renter providing an deposit to cover for damages and refunded when the vehicle is returned in acceptable conditions. In case of small disputes, a pre-arranged third party works as a arbiter. And in the case where there are some serious problems, actual courts and the "traditional" institutions should be there to execute their role.
I don't even know what the price of a taxi is anymore. That is the least important difference!
An Uber or a Lyft will actually show up - and quickly - when I call it; will actually take me where I want to go without wasting time running up the meter; and will actually charge me in a fair and predictable way, which does not involve dickering with the driver or unexpectedly having to find a bunch of cash because the card reader is "broken".
All of these things can be reasonably summarized as forms of trustworthiness.
Not to mention that if Über really provided "tons of value", they would've been profitable by now. But they only got popular because they have Softbank subsidizing riders for over 10 years already.
They lease their own fleets, no? I am talking about the a system where individuals can put their own vehicles in the "market" for others to use.
Edit: Okay. I am checking Turo now, I wasn't aware of them. Still, they are a middleman between car owner and driver, right? How do they make money?
Edit 2: Reading from their website, it seems like they are focusing on being a rental aggregator. All the talk about "building your business" seems to indicate their cars are not from individual owners that actually use the car. So, no, I wouldn't say they qualify as an alternative to what I am talking about.
This is an important observation. Your neighbour trusts you because of the relationship you have with them, your membership in the same group (home ownership in a neighborhood), proximity and availability (they know where you live and can contact you easily if they want the weedwhacker back), and you already have collateral in play (ownership of your home and reputation in the community).
The key to building trust online is to recreate some of these aspects. You should have an identity in the community that you belong to and you should own assets under that identity so you can’t easily abandon it and start somewhere else with your ill gotten gains. Communication amongst members of the community should be easy and common. There should even be shared ownership of community assets and the community should provide services to its members.
I imagine this looking something like a discord server combined with some of the hosting features of FB like image sharing, posts, groups, etc. You’d also need a built in token that could be used within the community but also exchanged on a broader network of federated communities.
Even further if your neighbor totally trusts you you can just go grab it and they will know that it will be back where it belongs, fully fueled/charged and maintained when needed.
This drive to atomize humanity and make all relationships fungible is insane, and the only benefit is it allows long distance fuedalism.
Trust isn't necessary for lending tools to your neighbor, pure self-interest is good enough. Cultivating good relationships with people who know where you sleep is just good sense, and looking out for your neighborhood is mutual aid. Next to reason, trust is inconsequential in such a situation.
Slowest and least efficient.. you realize some blockchains update in seconds? For a low value proposition like borrowing a lawnmower you dont need the most secure public network on earth to do it. You use the right blocchain for the right applications.
The problem with trust, is that its awesome until it aint. When we are deaing with gov policy, billions of dollars, war, your life savings,etc a break in trust is beyond costly, making the use cost of a slower but secure blockchain the responsible thing to do.
So war on the blockchain? That sounds like a good example of what is meant by "dystopian." Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain. It's like you took democracy, but got rid of the elements of constitutional republicanism that mitigate the weaknesses of democracy, leaving only the weaknesses. Except not really, because that would be a plain tyranny of the majority of unique human persons and this is a tyranny of a majority of wealth, which may only be a tiny number of people. I guess it's more like returning to feudalism, except the lords and kings no longer have to raise armies and fight each other. The richest coalition just wins automatically.
> Imagine a world where whether Ukraine gets to stay sovereign or becomes part of Russia is determined by a global consensus of the wealthiest wallet addresses on a blockchain.
Actully, this is basically what’s happening in your example.
The citizens of the wealthiest countries are participating in the war by sending armaments and aid to Ukraine. The majority of the world’s citizens* are sitting it out or providing some amount of assistance to the Russian side, mainly through commerce.
It’s not on the blockchain, but essentially wealth is “voting”.
FWIW I’m far, far from being a blockchain supporter. I’m just addressing your example.
* yes, at the UN the majority states voted against Russia, but if you look by populations, the west won an “electoral college” victory on the topic.
I think the point is that it’s just a change of venue for making consensus; the roles don’t change.
A small number of people with lots of resources choose whether a large number of people with few resources fight each other to the death.
GGP implied that war was something a blockchain could “fix”, but GP argues that it, at best, it maintains the status quo.
In my opinion, it’s a little worse than the status quo because at least before those with few resources got some small say in the matter via their elected representatives.
It already does take seconds. Sometimes even minutes or hours. When you click "buy now", Amazon optimistically pretends the order completed instantly, and queues a backend job to charge your card. If your card is declined, you get an email some time later.
I agree it's inefficient, but, um, that happens to me all the time when I'm in a part of my house where the Wi-Fi doesn't reach very well, and I still go to that part of the house and
I still use Amazon in it. Waiting 10 seconds for an order confirmation is not a big deal if the result is I can get a rice cooker shipped to my house within 24 hours.
