Trusting the trustless Blockchain

Trustless, a term often banded around the blockchain world, a word used to glorify all things blockchain, a term that not only confuses almost all new arrivals but a term that is difficult to portray.

Whilst researching for the next Blockchain Manchester talk and after attempting to convey what trustless means to various people over the last few weeks I thought I would write down some of my own understandings on the subject of trust in relation to Blockchains.

Everyday life trust

In everyday life you are placing your trust in things whether you think about it or not. Implicitly — its everywhere.

• You trust the bank will correctly debit the coffee you just purchased.
• You trust your email service will only allow you to access your private emails.
• You trust the Uber driver who’s just picked you up
• You trust the government to maintain and uphold the rule of law.

The above are just some examples of trust that happens all the time, everyday purchases, agreements and transactions performed all have some form of trust baked in.

These social norms are taken for granted in most cases but, as yet, the same can not be said for Blockchain. Blockchains circumvent the notion of centralised authorities as they are not conceptually needed to exchange a piece of data, trust is established by consensus.

When referring to the non-blockchain world and using currency as an example, Banks and Governments provide things such as arbitration, conflict resolution and validation. All these things can happen on the Blockchain but without centralised control or authority.

People often refer to the blockchains being trustless but what does this mean and how can something that is trustless be classed a trustworthy?

Trusting the Blockchain

The core and driving force that you are trusting when using Blockchain is the technology and its ability to not have to trust other participants from a protocol and ownership stance.

Since every participant has the same rights as all others, majority consensus rules and the distributed consensus holds the only possible truth. The Byzantine Generals’ Problem is often used to demonstrate this concept.

Blockchains are trustless as no one has to trust anyone else for the system to work as expected.

Distributed consensus algorithms such as proof-of-work or proof-of-stake are what provides the mechanism to be classed a trustless.

For the public and the enterprise, trust is a time game, the longer they work as expected the more domains they will be used in before Blockchain, also know as Distributed ledger technology, will become more and more mainstream. Below are other areas which I think also contribute to the trust which can be placed in Blockchain technology.

• Trust that all other participants have to abide by the same rules as you do
• Trust that you control your identity on a blockchain
• Trust in the cryptography that secures data on the blockchain
• Trust in the privacy and anonymity a Blockchain may provide
• Trust in the security and safety of Smart Contracts
• Trust in underlying distributed consensus

Distributed consensus is not 100% foolproof, many public Blockchains suffer from a possibility of a “51% attack” where the majority consensus is overruled. This is currently a problem on many smaller Blockchains until their networks get large enough to resist such attacks or other mechanism of trust and permissions are used.

Conclusion

Above I have tried to briefly explain the trustless nature of Blockchain. This in my opinion is one of its best features but consumers and enterprises must also believe in it before mainstream adoption will fully happen. Above I have also listed out some of the things that must be validated before this ever happens, only then will we reach “peak Blockchain”.

Finding domains other than currency where distributed consensus are the core to the problem being solved is one of the ongoing challenges for the Blockchain world.

We plan on exploring trust further along with other Blockchain related subjects and tech at the next Blockchain Manchester event: Meetup 1: Building decentralised Apps and Trust

Check out some of my other articles who can you trust in a decentralised world and the rise and rise of blockchain, or subscribe to our Medium publication Blockchain Manchester for the latest posts.