In my first installment on the topic of Trustless, I opened the paradigm of the game-changing influence of Trustless computing and how it offers us the opportunity to rethink how we manage data and privacy. In this article I will attempt to dig deeper into what it actually requires to be considered to be trustless.
How to be Trustless?
The first thing to remember is to be trustless you need to put yourself in a position where nobody needs to put any “trust” in you! To understand this more clearly, we need to consider something special about the word “Trust”; Trust is a “belief”. Hence, to be “Trustless” implies nobody ever needs to “believe” you are doing anything “good”, “bad”, “dishonest”, “self-serving”, “biased” or “deceptive” and even “noble”.
Nobody needs to have any belief that things are trustworthy because things are so transparently clear to everyone as, “doing what it says on the tin”, that there is simply no need for anyone to take a leap of faith and hence put their trust in you.
Let us all take the premise that reaching a pure state of “Trustless-ness” is something of a journey, and the goal is to get as close to the centre of pure trustless-ness as possible. One might say, there are degrees to which something can be Trustless. So the question of “How to be Trustless” might be better framed as…
The Journey to(wards) Trustless
If premise that nobody ever needs to “believe” in your trust worthiness, what are the key elements that come into play to embark to be trustless.
1. Privacy and Confidentiality: A good starting point would be to dive in and have a platform where no data is ever seen or disclosed, to even the platform itself. In today’s terms, we would describe that as encrypted. The data should remain encrypted and only be accessible by the data owner. And the data owner should be the only person who is able to give permission to anyone else to access any part of their data.
2. Transparency and accountability: Saying you can’t see the data itself would be no good on its own. You would also need to be able to provide evidence that the data was always invisible (encrypted) to the platform and anyone else for that matter. And this would all have to be auditable, a ledger of sorts), in a way, which couldn’t be retrospectively altered or manipulated (tamper-proof). More than that, the ledger would have to demonstrate and affirm that the data had remained encrypted, without ever seeing the actual data too.
3. Proof transactions are genuine: For every transaction taking place on the invisible (encrypted) data, the platform would also need to prove that every transaction and operation was taking place as intended. Considering all of the data itself would be invisible to the platform, how will it perform this careful (almost mission impossible like) orchestration of seemingly accessing the data, without seeing it, and then evidence the fact it had followed those instructions and performed the transactions as it was intended with the data it was supposed to. In practical terms, this would be managed with cryptographic riddles hidden away in the data itself which would allow the Platform to collect unguessable clues, that prove the transaction in fact took all the data from where it was supposed to.
4. Secure management of multi party interactions: Finally, it would need to be able to help multiple parties complete transactions collectively or simultaneously with another’s data, working with invisible (encrypted) data from each party. Which by default implies at least offering the possibility of completing transactions without disclosing the data of one party to another could be imaginable i.e. so the data of one party would be invisible to both the platform and all other parties.
Phew! So a lot is needed…
And maybe there are other steps I have missed… But I suspect the above starts to paint a picture of what is required in order for a system or platform to be Trustless. The interesting thing is that by removing any need for the users of a platform to trust it, you open the door to many interesting scenarios within which transactions can be managed or orchestrated.
For example:
- Multiple individuals (or companies) could compare their customer records for regulatory or fraud purposes, to see if all the client’s addresses were consistent and the same in their respective databases, without ever disclosing which actual customers belong to either party.
- Processes across businesses could be automated with the use of things like smart contracts which could seamlessly validate and verify databases in separately and prove that no data was disclosed to either the trustless platform or other parties. And leave an audit to prove it every time the contract is executed. Smart Contracts with on trustless platforms would help perform transactions on siloed data that would otherwise be difficult or cumbersome to access. Hence could be an accelerating force for many Digital Transformation use cases.
- Consumers or Data owners in general can perform transactions with many different digital applications ranging from dating apps to managing their social media profiles/content, with the knowledge that the company hosting the data would never be able to see any of it. And only individuals or persons specifically with permission could, and have the reserved right to stop this at any point, hence always be in control.
The list goes on and on, until we reach a world where companies essentially can move towards automation amongst themselves vertically or horizontally in their respective value streams. Users and Data owners always control their data. The ability to monetise information otherwise left in digital platforms eventually becomes impossible without consent or permission from the original owners. Any wrong doings can be and would be visible and hence easy to find and remedy.
This is a real inversion of the paradigms we are commonly used to, “Innocent until proven guilty” becomes “guilty until proven innocent”. And since philosophically everyone has self interests and therefore cannot be completely trusted, lets “trust” by having them constantly and consistently demonstrate their innocence. One might even say we changed the game from Big Brother is watching us, to we are watching you Big Brother!
In the next instalments of this series, I will attempt to deep dive into Trustless Economies/business models and provide a brief history of how the mechanisms behind trustless platforms work i.e. provide a very brief history of the evolution of encryption.
Thank you to Florian Guitton for his contributions in helping me articulate this article.
