Andrew Leonard: I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet as well as I remember the birth of my children. The summer of 1993; I was a reporter at the alt-weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and my editor assigned me a story about an anime convention in Oakland, California. I asked the organizer of the conference where I could find some otaku (fanboys) to interview. “They all hang out on the Internet,” he said.

I didn’t have Internet access, but I had a modem and a CompuServe account that I used to exchange emails with my uncle. An hour spent lurking in a CompuServe anime forum sparked a life-changing epiphany. The online world, I realized instantly, was a fantastic reporting tool. I learned more about anime in that hour than I could have in a week spent tracking down interview subjects via landlines. I knew right away that I had to break out of the CompuServe walled garden and start homesteading the wild Internet.

From that day forward, my Rolodex might as well have been carved on cuneiform tablets. Within a week, I had figured out how to use my wife’s University of California, Berkeley student account to telnet and gopher and FTP my way around the pre-web “Net.” Within the year, I had quit the Guardian (although not before dropping a cover story — “How to Connect to the Internet”) and started writing for a brand new magazine called Wired.

I loved the Internet. But 25 years later, I see the words “the blockchain is the new Internet” scrolling down Twitter andI want to shake my news feed by the scruff of the neck and growl: Have you people learned nothing?!

As is so often the case with new converts, I was an instant over-the-top evangelist. And why not? Dreams formerly relegated to pulp science fiction novels had become reality: the library of all knowledge was just a few 14.4 baud beeps and gurgles away. I was far from a libertarian but I do confess to resonating to John “cypherpunk” Gilmore’s declaration that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Totalitarians, corporate overlords, and media monopolies: beware! Your gatekeeping days were over! The Internet had set us free.

Gosh, I loved the Internet. But 25 years later, I see the words “the blockchain is the new Internet” scrolling down Twitter and it’s all I can do to keep from screaming: Oh man, I fucking hate the blockchain. I want to shake my news feed by the scruff of the neck and growl: Have you people learned nothing?!Call me apostate, or maybe just an aging grouch, but if the blockchain really is the new Internet, we’re all screwed.

Let’s get a few things out of the way. I do not hate the blockchain because I fundamentally question the technical merits of cryptographically-secured, distributed-database technology. Nor do I hate the blockchain because of how quickly Initial Coin Offerings turned from “innovative way to raise startup capital without selling your soul to venture capitalists” to “how fast can we scam a whole generation of crypto-suckers out of their cash before security regulators slam the door on our collective ass?” I don’t even hate the blockchain because bitcoin seems, at this point, primarily a way to transmute massive amounts of electricity into a speculative, climate-change acceleratinginvestment commodity. There are a great many smart people working on blockchain implementations and a ton of money pouring into the space. I am prepared to concede that some useful applications will emerge that make my life more convenient and don’t break the planet. A few years had to pass between Mosaic 1.0 and the debut of Spotify and streaming Netflix and the iPhone. There’s still plenty of time before we call this round of innovation a wrap.

No, my problem has little to do with the actual technology. My gripe is with human faith in technology. The same kind of utopian promises that bloomed during the Internet’s early heyday — “freedom, fairness, and equality for the society of tomorrow” — are on the tip of every bitcoin miner’s tongue. The passion of the true zealot is everywhere: “The blockchain will set us free.”

But if there is one thing that we should have learned from the history of the last 25 years, it is that digital networks and computers and code are no solution to human brokenness. With each passing day, the opposite seems more likely to be true. Pressure exerted by the Internet cracked some long-existing social fissures wide open.

Instead of gaining access to the library of all human knowledge, we ended up card-carrying members of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Library of Babel” — that infinite biblio-nightmare that stockpiled every possible iteration of gibberish along with the real books written in real languages.

Instead of leading us to truth, the Internet gave everyone the unparalleled opportunity to build their own personal knowledge universe, catalyzing a comprehensive unmooring of society from actual fact that has surely been a factor in the rise of Trump and a global turn towards propaganda-fed authoritarianism.

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers… But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced.

Instead of freeing ourselves from the manipulation of corporations and governments, we have bequeathed them the most powerful tools of panopticonic surveillance and control ever invented.

The smartest blockchain developers that I have talked to do not deny these truths of what the Internet has wrought. On the contrary, what gets them most excited about the future is their confidence that blockchain technology is the antidote for all the toxic ills unleashed by Internet anarchy. Once their dream of perfectly decentralized, unhackable, smart-contract-executing “trustless” tech is perfected, they believe, central banks and government tyranny will be rendered impotent, nation-state borders transcended, voting fraud and fake news made impossible. The blockchain, in their view, is a teleological apotheosis, the perfection of progressive human civilization through technology.

At the heart of this vision is the idea that human messiness can be abstracted away by clever code. In a “trustless” system, public key cryptography and the “consensus” generated by distributing a database across multiple nodes eliminates the potential for fraud or corruption or exploitation committed by any intermediary. Smart contracts will automatically execute the terms of any deal, without getting bogged down by human fickleness or well-capitalized litigation. Tyrants will be powerless against cryptocurrency-funded freedom fighters organized in decentralized networks.

That’s the theory, anyway. But it misses the most important point about human messiness. The indisputable fact — obvious to anyone who has studied the history of technology or simply been alive for the last 25 years — is that living, breathing humans will deploy any conceivable technology for both good and evil, for the realization of both freedom and tyranny, for greed and power, and just plain mayhem. The Internet gave white supremacists a voice denied to them for decades; nothing is going to stop them from figuring out how to use blockchain technology for bigotry. Smart contracts will be tested in human courts. Regulators will regulate.

Decentralization is the first commandment of the blockchain faith. But what did William Butler Yeats tell us happens when “the center cannot hold”? Things fall apart!

I respect the idealism of blockchain developers who, I believe, are sincere in their faith that they are building a better world. But I am confounded by their inability to see that they are falling victim to exactly the same fallacies their hacker forebears embraced: this notion that we can code ourselves out of the deep holes we’ve dug; that we are building utopias in our virtualities that will finesse away the imperfections of human character.

It seems to me increasingly clear that we need to spend less time abstracting away our humanity and more time pressing the flesh. Instead of seeking out the anomie of decentralization, we need to figure out how to come together. To successfully deal with the failings of humanity, we have to spend more time with humans and less time thumbing our smartphones.

It’s not hard to understand the urge to declare that “the blockchain is the new Internet.” The mid-90s were a giddy time; the astonishingly fast transformation that swept through the culture was unlike anything in recent memory, and if you were riding the shockwave of that blast, it was exhilarating. Linked together in a global network, the computers that Steve Jobs called “bicycles of the mind” promised to take us anywhere we wanted to go. And, of course, a whole lot of people ended up making quite a bit of money off the new digital infrastructure. So who wouldn’t want to return to optimism of those days? Peace, love, and the Internet, man. It was so groovy.

That’s why I loved the Internet so much. Because of that sense of possibility and hope and progress. But that’s also exactly why I hate the blockchain. Because it reminds me of just how illusory those promises turned out to be.

The post The Blockchain Is a Reminder of the Internet’s Failure appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following are the assessments for a cypherpolitics, its conditions, drives and intentions. The colour grey indexes the chromatics of the cypherpolitical position: a politics of obfuscation and exit, accumulating in tonal obscurity and flight. Core materials remain anonymous, as trust is not an acceptable criterion for developing any kind of political position. For this reason the cryptographic position drives towards the elimination of all forms of democracy, the updating or depuring of traditional political positions and ultimately the deletion of politics. In order for this to be realizable, we begin with the elimination of belief.

Belief

Societies and the movement of progress they inherit are based in belief. Unless a person is a zombie, operating without cognition, they are infested by belief. Whether it’s belief in oneself as someone or a belief in others, the central concept of belief drives societies. This is incarnated by religion, culture, science, or any deity to which society gives its arbitrary credence. Adjacent, and corrosive of belief, is the concept of trust. Trust between two or more people amounts to a handshake- a simple assessment of threat. Trust encodes the belief that two or more people have a mutual understanding of what they are saying and deem it to be true. Eye-contact helps. A third party can verify this in more developed elaborations of this central conceit, especially involving money. By replacing physical trust quotas with immutable code, the blockchain resolves this issue. This is why the blockchain is a central material tenet of cypherpolitics.

The rejection of belief and trust conduces to skepticism regarding people and society as a whole. To believe is to be naive and take at face value what is said and done. While cypherpolitics believes the dice is already loaded, and aims for privacy and obfuscation at a standard personal level, other political positions show an abundance of trust- a multiplicity of handshakes on every level at once. The cypherpolitical enterprise offers no such thing. It does not aim to signal to any other kind of politics. It aims not to signal at all, or signal indeterminately (white noise). Traditional political positions do not work because they work in earnest, with strategic opponent destruction at their core. Due to transparent logging systems this becomes dangerous. Acting in earnest, a statement of political preference is logged and effectively given an identifying signature- fastened tight by the belief held and trust felt within their political context. Such statements make them vulnerable to attacks by opponents or by the political system itself.

Therefore a rejection of belief is one of the undergirding principles of a cypherpolitics. The system of trust on which politics is based is fundamentally flawed. It cannot function alongside transparency. Any attempt to signal transparency is suspicious and will be met with outright rejection. Trust is the irritant around which the pearls of paranoia take shape. There is no human way of knowing if someone has expressed the truth. This can only be verified through technology. The only way for someone to subscribe to a cypherpolitics is to leave all traces of belief systems behind and only maintain the absolutely essential approximation of the ‘truth’. Heuristics follows- belief is avoided and we gain ground through strategies of obfuscation and indeterminacy.

Camo

Cypherpolitical positions mobilize with a strong sense of operational security. In politics, there is no system worth believing in. But we operate within these systems, as we must. Regardless of pleasure or necessity, people cannot remove themselves from politics. In order to do so it is necessary to create multiple identification signatures, or digital camouflage. Not identities- identities are too holistic. Given the girth of information required to create a stable identity it is liable to be interrupted at any time. One slip, an out-of-character information leak, and the chosen identity falls apart. In order to shut down security leaks it is necessary to remain voiceless. In the digital, it is laughably easy to execute anonymity through camouflage. Expression comes at a cost, and the cypherpolitical agenda offers freedom through fracture: multiplicity.

Compartmentalized identities are possible, but not desirable. Compartmentalization demands strong discipline and does not guarantee indeterminacy. If someone sniffs enough data packets, there is a strong chance of your constructed identity dissolving. Because not even you understand why you believe what you do, insight into the basis of a belief is rare. Beliefs are arbitrary, transient and prone to collapse. Positions you held fast can disappear at any second; and if you are not tracking these developments, someone or something else is.

The main rationale behind the use of cypherpolitical camouflage is the notion of disguise. Camouflage is a protective measure which ensures an ongoing interrogation of the site of belief is possible- free from the idle, empty accusations of the politically stedfast. A plurality of identities, serving as effective camouflage, works because of, not despite, its instability.

Whereas in the past tongue mutilation was the last resort to use in order to preserve your secrets, the digital realm has developed a material base where multiple identities can flourish and harden into protective obscurity. Cypherpolitics is advanced by these tools, but only to an extent. Technological migration is a necessity. The minute one tool is compromised, depleted, it is best to find a replacement. Resorting to deletion is not succumbing to an opponent’s or system’s pressures, but something cypherpolitics actively encourages. Deletion immediately refreshes anonymous intergrity and anonymity is the backbone of cypherpolitics- its most powerful feature. If your identities coincide across various platforms, forming patterns, your traces will lead clues. The data sniffer forms beliefs from this picture; denunciation follows. To avoid this, it is necessary to encrypt yourself.

Encryption

Encryption is the most sophisticated aspect of cypherpolitics. Because it is a word that originates from other disciplines and is not fully understood, it carries an additional obscurantist quality. In the fields of engineering it is well known. The general public may hear the word occasionally or even use it. Do not believe they know what they are talking about when the word is used carelessly without qualification, as it can afford a false sense of security to the person using it. Encryption should be thought about in personal terms of the particular services or mediums of communication you employ.

An argument can be made that encryption is only possible digitally, so a piece of paper is not an immediately obvious encryption device. As both the average user and the highly experienced software engineer knows, we all have secrets- things that we do not want to communicate, or desire to communicate securely. As a rule, communication with other parties is unavoidable. A secret between two parties is based on a guarantee of trust, and the confidence that no one will intercept your communication. Sadly, you cannot absolutely guarantee either of these options; but you can safely manage the context and method of communication. Operating wisely, you can control the other party and hold them accountable if the shared information becomes public. This is why we use a piece of paper as an example of a medium over which you can both communicate securely and insure that it is destroyed after use. This way, not even your voice is implicated. The only element that could possibly reveal you are implicated is the other party; or someone or something listening in.

You can make this process more complex. A simple system of equivalence between numbers and letters (A=1, B=2, C=3…) can be exchanged between the two parties. However, this requires time to develop and decipher. The solution becomes simpler when you use technology- encryption is automated, which means your communications are private and you can share them more easily with other parties. But the simplicity of digital encryption becomes more complex as third parties are sensitive to secrecy. Corporations, platforms and governments want the information to be publicly accessible for their use. The use of encryption denies this request. But this does not mean the third parties will stop trying to decipher your exchanges. To the contrary, third parties increasingly desire everything you communicate.

It used to be the case that cracking a cypher was, in the end, just a contest of force, and any party that was willing and able to bring the necessary amount of force to bear could spill their enemy’s secrets in time, simply by exhausting the space of possibility until telltale patterns emerge. But a threshold was crossed with modern encryption technology that has changed the situation entirely, and has introduced into the world a new asymmetry that cannot be conquered by brutality. Correctly implemented encryption algorithms with keys of sufficient complexity, cannot be defeated by any amount of brute force — at least none that any power in this universe would be capable of, even if it had until the end of time, and could burn out every star in the galaxy as fuel. A correctly encrypted secret is inviolate, beyond the reach of violence, even if the full power of the state is behind it. And the tools for implementing such encryption are ubiquitous and free, usable by essentially anyone.

Public key encryption went one step further, making it possible to share a secret without having to first share the keys for decrypting it (a decoder ring, for example, or some more sophisticated symmetric key) on an unencrypted channel, further dissolving the need for trust.

Not everything can be encrypted, at least not yet, and so violence slips quickly from the message to its environment, ferreting out side-channels- signals, inadvertent residues left in the noise produced by our encryption technologies, subtle differences in heat, sound, or electromagnetic resonance, that any physical implementation of these algorithms might generate. And, of course, we still have bodies that force can target. Encryption is strong, but the flesh is weak. The state might not be able to crack your private keys, but they can certainly put you on a waterboard until you give them up yourself.

Where encryption holds, trust is unneeded and force has no meaning. But it always seems to leave a frontier: establishing a channel where symmetrical encryption can take place required first exchanging keys outside that channel, and, there, force could be brought back to bear. Public key encryption beats back that frontier, allowing key exchange to happen under the cover of an impenetrable darkness, where force has no foothold. The problem of force, which is ultimately the problem of violence, is still with us, so long as some frontier to encryption is exposed, so long as we live in the clear. The task, then, at least in the most abstract terms, is to relentlessly expand the spheres in which we are not simply spared violence out of mercy, or allegiance, or trust in the powers that be, but out of necessity spared because we have carved out channels in which force loses all meaning. The choice is clear: encryption or religion, right to indeterminacy or surrendering to the idiotic caprice of transcendental powers. Positive freedom is our choice, and decentralisation is vital.

Decentralisation

The way your communication is handled matters because it might be liable for interruption, capture and leaking. Decentralisation is a word that has been talked about extensively, and matters broadly because of its logical, architectural and political consequences. If all our conversations take place in a room and we record our conversations so as to revisit them in the future, then our conversations are effectively centralized in one unique place. The risk is that centralization makes the room an easy target. All your recordings may be erased or stolen by a third party. Decentralisation is important in communications, transactions and information sharing practices because while it does not block all possibility of interception, it makes it more difficult for any third party to intervene with your communications.

With digital technologies the situation is more complex. While you can spatially decentralize your communication (by leaving a room, for example), your oral communications cannot be decentralized in time. This is a limitation, one that has been amplified and complicated by digital technologies. You now have new ways of communicating with other parties, but the medium lacks confidence and trust. It is unknown. Decentralization provides a method in which the platform can partition, in political, logical and architectural modes. This makes it possible for your information and communication to be logically and architecturally decentralized. But it also enables you to partition your political beliefs: to compartmentalize. The complexity of this mechanism, given way by technological substrata, needs to be understood as an epistemological and ontological shift: how you access the system vs what the system is. This is an active metaphysics in the political field, an aspect that has been ignored due to the various third parties that in exchange for shallowness, and reprehend and punish any attempt towards ideological depth.

Ideological depth

As the traditional view of politics becomes ever more fractured, it becomes increasingly shallow and without practical purchase. Activism at a local level makes sense when interconnected with other focal points, otherwise it descends into parasitic and corrosive hysteria. For the most part, we are beyond discourse with each other, choosing instead to highlight our differences in the hope of tribal self-identification -the congratulatory ingroup pat in the back. In this shallow water we have to watch as useless discourse gets elaborated on niche banalities. It is under the guise of terms such as ‘camaraderie’ and ‘solidarity’ that traditional political positions find themselves. Under such relations these positions portend to find use in their ideas, but they are practicality limited by their lack of engagement with other, rival positions.

Battalions of the blind circle islands of outliers, forcing rogue and maverick voices into silence, or worse, swiftly cornering their thoughts until they break. There cannot be true progress without the resurrection of those voices from elsewhere, from outside. The refusal of rogue voices to be drawn into the pitiful set of ideological options that are traditional political is not born out of stubbornness. It is a response to the lifestyle politics and rudimentary signaling towards a solidarity of the ingroup that now dominates political discourse without any sense of indeterminacy. The word crypto is currently in use in computer science, military, privacy services and most crucially to signal that someone believes something they do not seem at the surface to represent: hence the proliferation of the term crypto-nazi as a signaling mechanism for morality to come to the charge and eliminate this deceitful indeterminacy, a plateau of shallowness encrypting another political option. The cypherpolitical position is an affirmation of encrypting your political alternative in the space of indeterminacy and greyness. It is not the right of a third party to push you in the direction it believes you should go. Encryption mechanisms give you the right to uphold variable positions without showing allegiance to any of them. Traditional political positions, even at their most sophisticated and contemporary, espouse a sense of correctness and righteousness that limits one’s enemies to mere caricatures, summoned solely to demonstrate this correctness of thought.

The childish gleefulness now melting the minds of a confused body politic results in the detachment of the cypherpolitical. They do not need the trouble. Their minds are already elsewhere. They have seen how it all ends, how techonomic time operates, and they will spend their time preparing for the cold winds coming. Keep moving or die.

Exit

Exit, as any simple dictionary would have it, is a way out, a departure. Those with an inclination towards cypherpolitics rationally choose to exit. There are no easy routes out of the ruins of civilization, society, culture or politico-economic systems, but there is an strategic intelligence in this mindset that renders the discovery of exit routes possible. Cleanly enunciated, without hope, belief or trust (elements which must be kept at a minimum and with maximum discernity), the universal acid of cypherpolitics sees a way in and a way out. How you navigate the system is entirely up to you.

The process of exit is already in progress, hiding in plain sight and available when inquired coldly. One of the salvos is economic, that is, the decoupling of monetary currency from third parties, as undertaken by Bitcoin and underlyingly, the blockchain. Another element is territorial, with its most contentious advice is to plot floating islands of liberty at sea. However, the most important way in which exit is already happening is internal- the encrypted mindscapes that grow ever more impenetrable to transcendental miserablism. This mindspace exit is the exit from politics as traditionally conceived between the polar opposites of the left and the right. The transcendental miserablist position is a clear cut, political tradition that must be espoused by both the left and the right. It amounts to a general disillusionment in the present moment and the conditions in which thinking is enclosed. Transcendental Miserablism sees no exit from this mindspace. It is an isolated and depressive position.

However, even at the times when the people that advocate for transcendental miserablism see a glimpse of light, they move in the coordinates that make exit entirely difficult. The negation of any possibility of exit is not entertained by cypherpolitics. In the last instance, the cypherpolitical position makes possible for you to navigate mindspace, encountering entrances and exits from systems you may or may not agree with. The programmatic assessment of the cypol is clear: you can depart. There is no fight, only flight.

Signed,

The Union of Researchers for a Collective Commons.

• Marta Fleming.
• Jean Jones.
• Paul Fraser.
• Aaron Collins.
• Bruce Rogers.
• Sandra Wood.
• Dr. Rose Loayza
• Carl Barnes.
• Arthur Morris.
• Jack Ross.
• Alexander Ennis.
• Luca Leary.
• Roberto Carneiro

The post Cypherpolitical Enterprises: Programmatic Assessments appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“On 20 July 2016, something happened that was arguably the most philosophically interesting event to take place in your lifetime or mine.”

The above quote is undoudbtedly hyperbole if you’re not a geek, but nevertheless, last year’s conflict around Ethereum and The DAO, which punctured the anarcho-capitalist utopia of a trustless society, was a milestone for the understanding of technological systems and their embeddedness in human value systems. Rather than aiming for trustlessness and the atomization of individuals in automated market systems, we should focus our efforts on building systems based on trust between humans, on community building, and on the centrality of the commons.

This article gives details around last year’s DAO crisis around a central theme: Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust!

Excerpted from E J Spode:

“Such are the perils of supposedly trust-free technology. It might make for good marketing copy, but the fact of the matter is that blockchain technology is larded through with trust. First, you need to trust the protocol of the cryptocurrency and/or DAO. This isn’t as simple as saying ‘I trust the maths’, for some actual human (or humans) wrote the code and hopefully debugged it, and we are at least trusting them to get it right, no? Well, in the case of The DAO, no, maybe they didn’t get it right.

Second, you have to trust the ‘stakeholders’ (including miners) not to pull the rug out from under you with a hard fork. One of the objections to the hard fork was that it would create a precedent that the code would be changeable. But this objection exposes an unmentioned universal truth: the immutability of the blockchain is entirely a matter of trusting other humans not to fork it. Ethereum Classic Classic would be no more immutable than Etherum Classic, which was no more immutable than Ethereum. At best, the stakeholders – humans all – were showing that they were more trustworthy qua humans about not forking around with the blockchain. But at the same time, they obviously could change their minds about forking at any time. In other words, if Ethereum Classic is more trustworthy, it’s only because the humans behind it are.

Third, if you are buying into Ethereum or The DAO or any other DAO, you are being asked to trust the people who review the algorithm and tell you what it does and whether it’s secure. But those people – computer scientists, say – are hardly incorruptible. Just as you can bribe an accountant to say that the books are clean, so too can you bribe a computer scientist. Moreover, you’re putting your trust in whatever filters you applied to select that computer scientist. (University or professional qualifications? A network of friends? The testimonials of satisfied customers – which is to say, the same method by which people selected Bernie Madoff as their financial advisor.)

Finally, even if you had it on divine authority that the code of a DAO was bug-free and immutable, there are necessary gateways of trust at the boundaries of the system. For example, suppose you wrote a smart contract to place bets on sporting events. You still have to trust the news feed that tells you who won the match to determine the winner of the bet. Or suppose you wrote a smart contract under which you were to be delivered a truck full of orange juice concentrate. The smart contract can’t control whether or not the product is polluted by lemons or some other substance. You have to trust the humans in the logistics chain, and the humans at the manufacturing end, to ensure your juice arrives unadulterated.

Can’t these gateways to the system be trustless as well? Can’t smart contracts some day have code to call for robotic orange-pickers and robotic juice concentrate-makers who would summon their robotically driven trucks to deliver the orange juice concentrate straight to our door? Yes – in theory. But imagine the task of reviewing the code to ensure that every step in the process hadn’t been corrupted by a bug that uses security failures to highjack trucks, or that gives false approvals to adulterated orange juice. Perhaps we could write second-order programs to automate the testing of the first-order programs – but why do we trust those? Do we ultimately need automated automated-program-tester testers? Where does it end?

By now, the answer should be obvious: it ends with other humans. Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust. Instead of trusting our laws and institutions, we are being asked to trust stakeholders and miners, and programmers, and those who know enough coding to be able to verify the code. We aren’t actually trusting the blockchain technology; we are trusting the people that support the blockchain. The blockchain community is certainly new and different, and it talks a good game of algorithms and hashing power, which at least sounds better than tired slogans such as Prudential is rock solid and You are in good hands with Allstate. But miners aren’t necessarily any more reliable than the corporations they replace.

The sorry case of The DAO raises another question: Why are people so eager to put their faith in blockchain technology and its human supporters, instead of in other social and economic organisations? The upheavals of 2016, from Brexit to Trump, suggest that there is widespread fatigue with traditional institutions. Governments can be bought. Banks are designed to service the wealthy, and to hell with the little guy. ‘The system is rigged’ is a common refrain.

But instead of targeting the moral failures of the system and trying to reform it, the very concept of ‘trust’ has become suspect. Blockchain enthusiasts tend to cast trust as little more than a bug in our network of human interactions. To be sure, one of the weird features of trusting relationships is that, in order to trust someone, there has to be some chance that they will fail you. Trust involves risk – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Which brings us back to Buterin and the hard fork of The DAO. What made this event significant was not just what it demonstrated about the foibles of technology or the hubris of 20-something computer scientists. What it really exposed was the extent to which trust defines what it is to be human. Trust is about more than making sure I get my orange juice on time. Trust is what makes all relationships meaningful. Yes, we get burned by people we rely on, and this makes us disinclined to trust others. But when our faith is rewarded, it helps us forge closer relationships with others, be they our business partners or BFFs. Risk is a critical component to this bonding process. In a risk-free world, we wouldn’t find anything resembling intimacy, friendship, solidarity or alliance, because nothing would be at stake.

Perhaps we ought to reconsider the desire to expunge trust, and instead focus on what should be done to strengthen it. One way to support trust is to hold institutions accountable when they betray it. When the US Department of Justice, for example, elected not to prosecute any of the bankers responsible for the 2008 financial collapse, the net effect was to undermine confidence in the system. They debased the principle of trust by showing that violating the public’s faith could be cost-free.

Much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same

Second, trusting relationships should be celebrated, not scorned. When we believe in someone and they betray us, our friends might call us a sucker, an easy mark, a loser. But shouldn’t we celebrate these efforts to trust others – just as entrepreneurs talk up the value of failure on the road to innovation? Isn’t the correct response along the lines of: ‘I see why you trusted them, but isn’t it is terrible that they let you down?’

Third, we should appreciate the trusting relations we engage in, and are rewarded by, every day. We’re constantly relying on others to help us with something or look after our financial affairs, and much of the time we simply take it for granted. In part, that’s because much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same.

Finally, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves with the idea that a technological fix can replace the human dimension of trust. Automation of trust is illusory. Rather than disparaging and cloaking human trust, we should face the brutal truth: we can’t escape the need to rely on other people, as fallible and imperfect as they might be. We need to nurture and nourish trust – not throw it away, like so much debased and worthless currency.”

The post On the perils of trustless systems appeared first on P2P Foundation.