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RE: The limits of knowledge - why we don't know enough about blockchain
Great post. It's ironic that the revolution of blockchain is trustlessness but what we're finding is that that's impossible for most if not all people. Even if the tech is there, most people will still have to trust the tech. Which means we come back to putting our trust in people and/or institutions. I think Andreas has an excellent point: at the moment Bitcoin has a trust value of 20 billion dollars (or whatever it's market cap is) times its time in existence. Other consensus systems are younger and less valued at the moment but they'll grow. Some will lose our trust (the DAO fiasco) and some will gain. But in the end there is no such thing as a trustless society, just degrees of trust.
This is a great point.
We saw this emerge with the so-called digital signatures and PKI which purported to allow humans to sign contracts digitally. But nobody could do RSA maths in their heads, so we ended up having to trust the tech. Which led us down the garden path building more and more complicated trusted thingummybobs. Until ... we discovered that they were too complicated to use and users just ignored them.
So I like to ground such discussions in real users, not to fall in that trap again.