It’s time to stop calling blockchain ‘trustless’
Of all the adjectives used to describe blockchain technology, the one that seemingly causes the most confounding head-scratching is ‘trustless.’ For just one of many egregious examples, just look at the title of a piece from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania on “the rise of trustless trust.”
It’s time to stop. It’s time to drop that word—trustless—from the collective blockchain lexicon.
Now, before the crypto community descends upon me en masse like a mama bear defending her cubs, an admission: I’ve been in energy blockchain for a few years now, but I come to the community decidedly from the energy side of the equation. This makes me a crypto convert more than a crypto evangelist.
I am an outsider who has become an insider. It’s a position that I believe allows me to get a fresh perspective on terminology that has become reflexive, instinctive, second-nature for the true blockchain natives among us.
Moreover, the professional hat that I wear more often than all others is that of marketing and communications. It’s my job to think about things like brand positioning, key messaging, and other such matters of how we talk about this exciting new technology.
And I keep coming back again and again to the same conclusion: the term ‘trustless’ is wrong—at least for the energy blockchain community of which I’m a part. Worse, it also potentially undermines progress we might otherwise make faster, if we didn’t have to spend so much time explaining what exactly that term means to the non-blockchain majority of the global energy sector.
The problem with calling blockchain ‘trustless’
Look, I get it. On an intellectual level, I understand what we mean when we call blockchain ‘trustless.’ One of the founding principles of blockchain is this idea that we no longer have to trust singular, big, centralized intermediaries.
At a time when trust in a brand is more important to consumers than ever (yet most consumers distrust many of the brands they’re faced with every day), blockchain’s mantra of being a ‘trustless’ alternative makes it a compelling iconoclast. For nascent blockchain technology, it’s a way to differentiate itself from the incumbent technologies it is trying to replace (or at least augment).
But at what cost?
On an emotional level, I repeatedly return to the allergic reaction of ‘no, no, no’ when confronted with another description of blockchain as a ‘trustless’ approach.
First, it’s disingenuous. Blockchain doesn’t so much remove trust from the system entirely; instead, it reallocates and distributes trust differently.
We still have to believe that this alternative system works; we still have to believe that it ‘does what it says on the tin.’ That requires trust—even if who or what we’re trusting is different than before. (To wit, in a February 2019 piece for Wired, Harvard Kennedy School technologist Bruce Schneier argued that blockchain’s promise of a trustless system is false.)
Blockchain engenders trust in any number of ways: Because claims are auditable on chain, I can verify them for myself; in so doing, I can trust the claim itself, rather than the messenger of the claim. In some cases, token staking and other forms of posting collateral that’s at risk provides disincentive for bad behavior. Making the entities hosting validator nodes on the network itself known—as the Energy Web Chain does—provides welcome transparency that builds trust.
Second, as human beings, we are heavily conditioned to desire trust. That’s why corporate team-building events are rife with exercises like trust falls. That’s why in the movie Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack asks Kate Winslet’s Rose, “Do you trust me?” before their famous scene at the prow of the ship.
Reciprocally, a lack of trust equates to something bad. Words such as distrust and mistrust—both relating to a lack or misplacement of trust—have negative connotations.
In the world of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, brands left and right are racing to position themselves as your ‘trusted partner’ and it’s hard to find a SaaS company’s website that doesn’t have a logo cloud somewhere showing that their solution is ‘trusted by…” X, Y, and Z happy clients.
So if trust = good and lack of trust = bad, why does blockchain insist on aligning itself with this term ‘trustless’? We’re swimming against the tide, and we don’t need to.
If blockchain isn’t ‘trustless,’ then what is it?
My fundamental premise is that ‘trustless’ is a mantle blockchain doesn’t need to carry, especially in the energy sector. To stubbornly continue parroting the term is merely shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot.
Think about some of our most-important audiences, chiefly regulators and grid operators. Both of those segments are notoriously risk-averse. And being risk-averse means they aren’t about to gamble with ‘trustless’ technology. In fact, I’d argue exactly the opposite: energy regulators and grid operators alike need to trust blockchain technology as the global sector continues its march into the era of digitalization.
Any new technology solution—software or otherwise—faces the common challenge of finding its first customers. Doing that requires those first customers to trust the tech. Then once the tech is proven among early adopters, a broader swath of follow-on adoptees will be ready to in turn trust it.
Why, then, do we unnecessarily place this ‘trustless’ stumbling block in front of ourselves, creating a point of concern and required explanation that doesn’t need to be there in the first place?
Trust isn’t dead, despite blockchain’s attempt to herald a ‘trustless’ future. In fact, blockchain just might need from the market the very thing its messaging tries to obliterate: trust.
As Power Ledger’s Jemma Green wrote in Forbes last year, “The development of blockchain marks the first time it’s been possible to develop software that doesn’t require a trusted intermediary. And yet, perhaps ironically, it’s trust, or mistrust and uncertainty, in the technology that’s holding back blockchain’s mainstream adoption. A lack of trust is cited as one of the main reasons new technologies, and blockchain specifically, are failing to take off.”
And yes, trust in blockchain isn’t the same as blockchain itself touting a ‘trustless’ approach. But arguing that ‘you can trust blockchain because it’s a trustless technology’ doesn’t inspire much, well, trust.
Rather than juxtapose ‘trustless’ blockchain against legacy ways of doing business, instead, I suggest we re-calibrate how we communicate the idea of trust in the energy blockchain space. Just take a look at highlights from Deloitte’s 2020 Energy Regulatory Trends. Blockchain has major relevance for fully half of the big trends Deloitte identifies, including digitalization, cybersecurity, supply chain integrity, and know your counterparty (KYC). Pulling back the view even wider, that myriad more use cases where blockchain shines, from energy attribute certificate markets to leveraging distributed energy resources (DERs) for grid flexibility to electric vehicle charging.
Regulators, grid operators, and other energy market participants should see blockchain as an incredibly promising tool. But before they use that tool, they have to trust it. And to help them trust it, please, let’s stop calling it ‘trustless.’
