Trust me bro
How to get along with people you’ve never met
This is a brief history of of trust and trustlessness in human collaboration.
Trust came first. Trustlessness became necessary as we scaled.
Consider the tribesman…
In the beginning, there was the tribe
A tribesperson could generally align incentives with the ~150 other tribespeople because they’d shared so many experiences together. Tribespeople could extrapolate each other’s behavior from the huge amount of historical data that everybody had on everybody else.
Everyone had been indoctrinated into the same faiths, languages, customs, fears and desires, so shared context could be assumed in communication.
Small tribes were the peak environment for fostering trust. And it’s no wonder we still develop trust in similar ways — we stopped developing genetically about 40,000 years ago, when we were still roaming about the Savannah with our extended families. Yet, we only started farming about 10,000 years ago. And that is when our scale of collaboration with strangers really started to shift.
With the dawn of agriculture, tribes settled into villages, fermented into towns, expanded into cities and networked into nations.
Before long, we could no longer assume any degree of shared context or mutual benevolence with everyone we met. Strangers may try to swindle us. People may have wildly different codes of ethics than we do. And worst of all, we have no historical data on how these people we meet in the bazaar tend to behave!
Trust was no longer sufficient for mediating collaboration with the humans we met.
And that’s because (*drum roll* because this is one of three main points):
Trust is built on extrapolating from past behavior, shared context, and mutual benevolence
The height of trust might be in healthy family relationships. You have literally your whole lifetime of shared context, a trove of data on past behavior to infer future behavior, and a general desire to see each other thrive.
In a post-agricultural social sphere, we needed new social technologies to scale collaboration along with our rapidly expanding social circles. Social technologies like currency, courts and laws emerged to facilitate collaboration amongst strangers.
Thanks to these social technologies, I no longer had to trust you the way I trust my family. I only had to trust the coin you gave me in the market, or the courts I could drag you to if you broke our contract, or the authorities that would arrest you if you hurt me.
The Dawn of Trustlessness
Increasingly, we built confidence in those with whom we collaborated not through an abundance of trust in the other person, but from the shrinking necessity to trust anything but the system that mediated our collaboration — be it a currency or a contract.
That’s what we call trustlessness — the ability to trust in a system not because we trust the person across from us at the playing board, but because of the playing board itself.
Trustlessness, like trust, builds the confidence needed to facilitate human collaboration. But unlike trust, trustlessness is built on the opposites of inferring from past behavior, shared context, and mutual benevolence.
Instead… (*second drum roll* because this is point numero dos):
Trustlessness is built on transparency, verifiability and immutability
Transparency means you can see everything on the playing board. There’s no need for a long and empathetic history between the players.
Verifiability means you can verify the rules of the game and the moves that players make. No need to rely on any kind of shared context — the bumpers for social interaction are up, and they’re high enough that no one can climb over them.
Immutability means I don’t have to just hope you remain benevolent based on what I can see and verify. Instead, I have a greater guarantee that you couldn’t change even if you wanted to. The rules of the game are fixed, so once verified, I can trust they won’t change.
Take a public government for example. They’re at a scale that trust cannot be relied on to build confidence in them, so governments must aim instead for trustlessness. A good government by democratic standards is transparent about how officials are elected, their electoral system is verifiable and not behind closed doors, and they should have reasonable guarantees regarding term limits, e.g. an incumbent can’t singlehandedly change two years to fifty years.
Epic. Now because I like systems, let’s relate trust, trustlessness and group size in a good old dictum for the road (*final drum roll!*):
The smaller the group, the greater the degree to which trust fosters collaboration.
The larger the group, the greater the degree to which trustlessness fosters collaboration.
It’s reminiscent one of my favorite Nassim Taleb lines:
“With my family, I’m a communist.
With my close friends, I’m a socialist.
At the state level of politics, I’m a Democrat.
At higher levels, I’m a Republican,
and at the federal levels, I’m a Libertarian.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
As the social circle expands, so does our reliance on trustlessness for getting along. That’s why once we hit city size, trust diminished and new protocols were needed to scale collaboration.
When to Trust, When to Trust-less
In small groups, it’s much more effective to lean on the humanity of love, mutual respect and shared experience to further the groups’ goals. There are few forces in human life as powerful as loyalty, positive peer pressure and shared experience for achieving the impossible and aligning incentives.
In fact, trying to treat a small trustworthy group as if it were trustless — constantly micromanaging and verifying people’s work, being paranoid they’re going to change — is a detriment to collaboration.
Companies that masquerade behind the patently bullshit language of “We’re a FAMILY here at <insert uninspired firm here>” are trying to rapidly astroturf the efficiencies of trust into their work environment. But by definition, shared context and historical data on behavior takes time to build up, ergo trust takes time to accumulate.
Conversely, in large groups of strangers with conflicting interests and potentially malevolent actors, a person who relies on trust rather than trustlessness is apt to be a “chump”.
Trust is a better oil for collaboration when you’re driving on cozy country roads.
Trustlessness is a better oil for collaboration when you’re cruising down broad interstates of commerce.
Is Trust Better Than Trustlessness?
None of this is meant to value trust over trustlessness, or vice versa. Nation-level trustless protocols like currency and courts have achieved massive increases in standard of living.
Meanwhile, family and friend-level trust has kept us human and smiling among an increasingly atomized and robotic world.
To survive as a species, we need trustlessness. To thrive as humans, we need trust.
So know which game you’re playing and when in order to play it right. Don’t be a paranoid dick to people who deserve your trust, and don’t be a chump who relies on trust when trustlessness would be a superior collaborative oil.
Internet Scale Collaboration
So here we are. The world hit Internet size in the blink of an eye. We need a new social technology to scale collaboration.
Currency as a new social technology allowed for trustless value transfer. I didn’t have to wonder if the goat you’re bartering with me is sick. I could just bite your coin.
Contracts, laws and courts allowed for trustless collaboration. Maybe you’ll work well with me, maybe you won’t — but if you don’t, I have legal recourse against you to align our incentives.
Similar to currency and contracts, blockchain is a new social technology allowing for trustless compute and storage — I don’t have to wonder if what you claim to be computing and storing is actually what you’re computing and storing. I can see it on the blockchain.
We’re still treating our data like we live in a trust based economy, even when the custodians of that data have proven time and time again that they are not trustworthy in the least.
So onwards and upwards! We’ve metabolized the innovations of compute, storage and networking, and then consensus algorithms and hashing power, into this weird new social technology that brings trustlessness to the Internet.
Question now is, what do we build with this new social primitive?
Only DAOs will tell…
