I don't trust you, you don't trust me, neither of us trust the guy who owns the git server but I need to give you something without anyone being able to stop us.
You really shouldn't be doing a significant amount of your business with people who don't trust you and who you don't trust. Blockchain advocates really underestimate how much of functioning economies simply work because of trust (with lawyers and courts as a backup), and how small the potential "I don't trust you" market is.
It is okay to do business with people you don't trust, but the crux is that pow/pos doesn't actually solve most of the substantive trust problems.
Eg: all of the weird supply chain nonsense around blockchain. You can keep a ledger and so on, but if there's corruption/theft in the physical warehouse then the ledger is worth only and exactly the disk space to which it's written. No amount of distributed consensus will change anything about the fact that Joe's cousin's friend heard about the shipment and stole 10% of the bulk good and replaced it with dirt to make the weights match.
The problem of doing business with people who you don't completely trust is very real. However, blockchain offers no solution (except and unless the thing you are trading is something that literally be placed on a blockchain, ie nothing physical and nothing that depends on a legal system to enforce).
Do you trust the bank, credit bureaus or some other establishment that you deal with to not leak your sensitive info? Maybe you do. But in case you don't, which is a rational response to the past performance of some establishments (e.g. Equifax), your life still has to go on.
Did you trust the POTUS when he said that Iraq had WMD before starting a war? I suppose he's a painter now so everything's peachy.
A lot of people have been giving reminders of the general untrustworthiness of establishments, including Snowden & Assange. Establishments that many people are forced to deal with.
It would be nice if everybody could be safely trusted. For those who readily trust, there is no problem to solve.
However, some other people see untrustworthiness everywhere, so they take opportunities to try to opt out of the system by engaging in a trustless system that does not require privileged middlemen. It's been baby steps so far.
I'm sorry but this is a take I completely disagree with. Fundamentally, I do business with people I trust. If I don't trust someone, I'll simply never do business with them. No amount of bullet proof mathematical constructs will change this.
Now, I may trust someone now, but circumstances change. People change. I don't trust the universe to be constant. I thus want to enshrine agreements in contracts and and I want there to be institutions that can offer objective (within reason) arbitration in case my counterparty and I come to disagree in the future.
I don't know what sort of business you operate in, but in my industry, trust is paramount and is practically equivalent to capital. You'll simply not even be employed unless you are trusted. It takes a long time to build a track record and you can lose it in the matter of seconds if you make poor decisions.
So yes, IMO the world operates fundamentally on the basis of trust. I don't believe for a moment that long term successful business can be conducted in an environment without fundamental trust between counterparties. Again, trust does not equal blindly taking people at their word or neglecting due diligence. "Trust, but verify" is the saying.
> Now, I may trust someone now, but circumstances change. People change.
Trust is inherently a forwards-looking thing. If you don't trust someone not to change in a way that breaks the promises they've made to you, that's not trust at all.
> Fundamentally, I do business with people I trust.
> I don't know what sort of business you operate in
Software industry. When employers have tried to screw me out of things they promised me, I've pointed to sections of written contracts (with the unspoken understanding of a lawsuit if their side of the contract is not upheld) and it's saved me multiple times. These companies just don't care about what they promised you, you can't trust them, they only respond to the looming threat of legal action. On the flip side, I've been screwed before at those times where I didn't keep a meticulous paper trail. The last one was particularly tough because I thought I had made close friends with the person I was doing business with, and I genuinely thought they could be trusted, but they ended up stiffing me out of payment in the end.
In the software industry and in particular working at start-ups, promises are worth jack shit unless they're in a written contract. Nobody trusts anyone to uphold promises. I would love to work in an industry where people could trust each other to uphold their word. What industry are you in?
> Courts and lawyers are the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with.
Courts are extremely expensive and time-consuming. Contracts are definitely not the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with. If you do not trust someone to fulfill their side of a contract, you probably don't bother writing up the contract. The contract is there to punish breach of trust, not to establish trust.
Security is the opposite of trusting who you're doing business with. There's a reason super markets -- the most common type of business operating without high trust -- employ loss prevention professionals.
Notice that the blockchain offers no substantive defense to a five finger discount...
> The contract is there to punish breach of trust, not to establish trust.
If someone can only be trusted under threat of punishment, that means that they aren't actually trustworthy in the first place. I think we might have different definitions of trust. If I fully trust someone, to me that means that I know there's no need for the threat of court at all, because I can be sure that they will uphold their word even if it's in their better financial interest to break it.
We place trust in the courts of justice so we don't have trust every single party that we interact with. If the courts of justice or the government at large cannot be trusted, then society cannot function, and no amount of cryptography or technology of any kind can fix that.
It's funny how after over a decade the best bitcoin can do is an almost half solution to a problem more contrived than the plot of a daytime soap opera. Who the fuck actually has this problem?
This isn't a coherent problem statement, and to the extent that it is, it's solved by TCP/IP (this isn't the early 1980s; why are you using some random third party's server if you explicitly don't trust them to keep the server running? Run it from your own box. This has been solved since the early 90s.)
Eh? You can’t like give me anything - you can give me a token - which can also effectively be money. The latter usually occurs due to some other trust relationship needing to be established - we are back at square one.
I acknowledged “something you can exchange for money” - that was not the objection.
It doesn’t solve the underlying difficulty of exchanging physical goods and services that are not tokens - you, know, the actual hard part. It also doesn’t solve the laundering aspect once you try to get those tokens liquidated to something not volatile as fuck.
