Platforms for digital trust

Yan Pritzker
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

Trust is core to the human experience. We surround ourselves with people we trust. First, family — whom we learn to trust as babies. Then, friends whom we trust through time spent together understanding each other’s quirks and nuances. Then colleagues, with whom we can establish quick trust bonds, because we already know they are pre-filtered for us by whatever organization binds us together.

It’s easy to trust a small group of close friends, but you don’t extend the same level of trust to strangers you meet on the street. Even less trust is afforded to random strangers from across the world, especially if they are completely anonymous.

With the introduction of the Internet and digital means of communication, we came to build new bridges of trust enabling further reaching collaboration.

LinkedIn built a network of trust through relationships between parties who already trusted each other. The AirBnb’s, Ubers, and Turos of the world have given us trust-based marketplaces where the company provides the seed of trust by vetting one or both sides of the relationship. This enables us to trust strangers quicker, and with bigger things (house rental, getting into their cars, or letting them drive ours).

At each stage in this evolution of the trust model, we trust people progressively further and further from us, relying on trusted intermediaries to be the brokers of the trust relationship.

While the model of trusted intermediaries has been successful at expanding global commerce and facilitating interactions that would never have otherwise occurred, it has come with its own problems.

The trusted intermediaries have become giant honeypots of private information, which is prone to hacks and government surveillance. Second, this model only works relatively well for places where trusted intermediaries are actually trustworthy. Many places in the world lack trustworthy governments and core infrastructure.

Bitcoin is fundamentally an innovation in our trust model. We no longer need to trust the party on the other side of our transaction. We don’t need to know their name, where they live, or how many successful transactions they’ve done in the past in order to trust that they have the funds they claim to have, or that we can exchange funds.

Money is just the first application of this trustless trust model. Another interesting one is existence proofs like opentimestamps.org. If you create some content, you can hash it and store the hash in the blockchain, showing that the content was in existence at a certain point in time. This cannot be disputed due to the immutable nature of the chain, and does not require any trusted third party. This essentially replaces notaries with a service that is marginally free to use.

Over the next decade we are going to see a ton of evolution unleashed on top of this new platform of trust. just like social proof gave us AirBnB and Uber, proof of existence and proof of funds will give us infrastructure we can’t even yet imagine.

What are we going to build?

Bitcoin, not Blockchain

Hype Free Bitcoin Knowledge

Yan Pritzker

Written by

Author inventingbitcoin.com — Bitcoin, AWS, Early Stage Startup Advisor. Infrastructure at bloXroute Labs. Former CTO, Reverb.com.

Bitcoin, not Blockchain

Hype Free Bitcoin Knowledge

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