On Trust, Trustless Systems and Efficiency

Trust is an important thing, when you're dealing with humans. On the STEEM blockchain, trust is critical, and perhaps one of the most important aspects which the system relies upon to function properly.

Beanie Babies

I distinctly recall the first time I saw EBay in action. I was incredulous that people would use it. I'm standing there talking to someone who just sent real money to a complete stranger over the internet, hoping to receive something of fair value in return. The strange thing is that it worked. This friend of mine actually got lucky, the person he sent his money to actually delivered, and a transaction happened. My initial reaction was that he got very lucky, that it was a risky gamble, and that they would never be seeing any of my money because it makes no sense.

On closer inspection, and after putting a bit of thought into what was actually going on with the service, I realized how it could mostly work and not be a dumb scam. Nowadays, everyone seems to intuitively understand reputation systems. At that time, it wasn't so obvious. The important part of the system, which made it actually work in a way that most people could use, was the feedback mechanism and ranking. If misdeeds are certain to result in public exposure, it does make them less likely.

There is a bit of a big brother, Black Mirror aspect to all of the tracking and ranking and voting. I don't want to live in a world where someone can accidentally say the wrong thing and spiral themselves into ruining their life in an hour. It is becoming increasingly possible to do this kind of thing, and we really need to think about ways to make our systems more forgiving. A shot at redemption and some ability to be misunderstood, have a bad day, and still survive seems like a reasonable feature request.

Politics and Religion

Both are highly polarizing things to discuss. They are discussed often, but supposedly never in polite company or at Thanksgiving. There are aspects of both that are informative to consider.

Well, what are the goals? With politics, even though it's a reputation based popularity contest, I think one of the key goals is governance. By governance, I mean the collective rules and incentives that everyone is supposed to abide by, or get voted off the island. Most religion seems to also share this goal.

Ironically, as I'm putting my thoughts together about this post I am watching yet another dilemna unfold regarding trust on Steemit. It does seem that there are two sides to every story. The drama related to trust and betrayal seems to be never ending. It's easy to get caught up in all of it, and it is important in some sense. The danger with all of the political intrigue and smear campaigns is two-fold, at the very least.

The first danger is that it is a tremendous waste of time. We can become distracted, and spend our days quibbling about who said what and what did they really mean and I HAVE PROOF, DAMMIT. Fun for a while, but not a super productive way to use a scarce resource, namely our time. We would be better served to let most of the nonsense fly past and focus on creating something great.

The other huge danger, and there has been a ton of virtual ink spilled over this one already, is that the overall picture it paints of our community is not an attractive one. If we can't figure out a good way to get along with each other and focus on making this place awesome then nobody will want to come here. I'm not suggesting a land of rainbows and unicorns is the answer, but some amount of restraint and respect would be a good thing to help us avoid the trap that many online platforms seem to fall into. We already have large cesspools of bad behavior, just spend some time on twitter or in the comment sections of most YouTube videos and you will have a really good picture of what we should not be trying to do.

Trust Matters

Those negatives are a good reason to stay out of most of the day to day bickering, at least for me. The one thing that is still important, however, is that we must be able to stand up for what's right. Despite all initial impressions, trust and reputation are incredibly important on STEEM due in large part to the very nature of the system. Proof of Work crypto systems are designed around the idea of completely untrusted participants working to advance their own interests. These systems do achieve a remarkable ability to securely process transactions without any trust. The biggest drawback is that it comes at a high cost, in terms of overall efficiency. Delegated Proof of Stake (e.g. STEEM) does not work that way.

The system is designed to require a greater degree of trust. A lot like the EBay example from earlier, that trust comes primarily from reputation. Perhaps that notion is a lot of the reason there is so much activity in the reputation "discussions" that seem to happen so often. In many ways, it is a necessary part of what we do here. We definitely gain a lot of efficiency, having a system that focuses most of the computing power on processing transactions. It is something of a marvel, the speed and cost structure of the STEEM blockchain. Hopefully, as we continue to learn and build and grow this thing, we can also figure out how to save the controversies for just the cases where someone does something truly bad. Then again, I could be completely wrong about the drama and the attractiveness of it all. Reality TV does seem to be pretty popular, and there's a ton of popcorn emojis to go around.

Note: as per usual, images here are CC0 licensed from pixabay.com.