Re: "Bitcoin is money built on distrust." When is trust good and when is it bad? \ stacker news ~culture

Re: "Bitcoin is money built on distrust." When is trust good and when is it bad?x.com/MartyBent/status/1788957689122259094

1292 sats \ 38 comments \ @k00b 10 May culture

Harari's point that printing money creates trust is nonsense (the poor guy can't seem to avoid pretending to be an expert on everything), but I felt something when he framed bitcoin as "money built on distrust."

I haven't thought deeply about the negative implications of trust minimization - which must exist in some fashion. Bitcoiners talk a lot about the erosion of family, community, values, all things that involve lots of trust, a good kind presumably, so what makes that trust good and other kinds bad?

Society's decline, if it's more than just a feeling, seems to coincide with an erosion of trust. Could trust minimization erode it further and further society's decline, or does trust minimization heal it? If trust minimization heals it, by what mechanism? When is trust minimization good and when is it bad?

Maybe my engine is misfiring today, but I get the sense there are many kinds of trust, some good, some bad, and which is which depends on the context, but there has to be more to say about trust than that. Only, I have no idea what else to say about it.

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112 sats \ 7 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 11 May

Marty's take is flawed. Banks deserve zero trust. They have betrayed trust at every turn. To the contrary, there are many aspects of Bitcoin that are, in my opinion, built on trust:

The source code is open. While I have not read every line of code, I trust the consensus of the core developers who have. Since when has full transparency equated with distrust?
I trust that Bitcoin will not be inflated and that it will never exceed 21MM. Those who run nodes, myself included, will not allow this foundational aspect to change. I trust other node runners to do the same. This creates a deflationary economy. Things get cheaper over time. It's weird, but profound at the same time. This will lead to people saving money and to just stop spending on utterly wasteful crap. This will reduce profligate consumption and waste in all areas. A massive positive for humanity and our biosphere.
I trust that transactions on the blockchain, at least a few blocks deep, cannot be altered. To the best of my knowledge, these transactions are cryptographically and thermodynamically immortal.
I trust that there are no backdoors, but I have not verified this. Yet.
I trust that the double spend problem has been solved, although I admit, I do not have perfect clarity on this aspect - an area I periodically study.
I trust that Bitcoin is a far better monetary system than fiat.

I could go on.

Now, with regard to areas of our monetary system I do not trust? Read Broken Money and Lyn Alden will enlighten you on where things stand there.

60 sats \ 1 reply \ @teemupleb 11 May

Marty’s take is flawed? Marty is criticizing Harari’s take here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 11 May

You are right. I meant to say, Harari's take is flawed.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @Kontext 11 May

I think you mean Harari's take? Marty is specifically saying we shouldn't trust the banks :D

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 11 May

Yes. Indeed. I meant Harari's take.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 11 May

Did you miss our Broken Money Book Club? A bunch of us read it together.

I wasn't saying we should trust or distrust anything in particular. I just asked a bunch of questions because I think the topic is more nuanced than people treat it.

Great list of places where trust exists in bitcoin too!

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 11 May

Yes, I missed the Broken Money Book Club - and I really like book clubs. Life got in the way the past couple of weeks. Back in the saddle now. Yeehaw!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 11 May

+1.

157 sats \ 4 replies \ @orthwyrm 10 May

the "good" forms of trust you allude to have a secondary function of building relationships in a community, which of course is valued as we are social animals.

i don't see how the logic can extend to an impersonal system such as bitcoin, especially as it's in competition with the equally impersonal fiat system. trust minimisation is simply good systems design in this case, and i reject harari's framing that bitcoin is unusual for having this attribute; the true anomaly is the trust required in the fiat system.

233 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 10 May

Social trust is good, in part, because it reduces transactions costs. When we trust other people aren't trying to screw us, we can interact much more informally and expend less effort on due diligence.

Bitcoin reduces the number of the ways people screw each other over, which actually makes trust easier.

71 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 11 May

Harari's advocate might argue that due diligence is an another word for relationship building. So to the advocate, trust optional = more efficient = fewer relationships.

150 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 11 May

I'm thinking about all the time we have to spend reading reviews and looking for possible red flags. That stuff is pure loss, compared to a deservedly high-trust setting where it's not necessary.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 11 May

Yes, I agree that "good" forms of trust looks a lot like relationships where there's mutual trust. If trust only flows in one direction, to banks or governments or whatever, that's probably the bad kind.

My fear is that a trust optional society might tend to have fewer relationships, less good trust, than a mandatory trust society.

136 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lumor 10 May

A strong state erodes trust between individuals while increasing dependancy on the state, as you allude to.

Local decentralized trust between people is less likely to be betrayed or corrupted, so it's more stable and reliable, while trust on centralized institutions and a tiny minority of experts is a bigger honeypot for bad actors and a single point of failure.

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 May

Society's decline, if it's more than just a feeling, seems to coincide with an erosion of trust. Could trust minimization erode it further and further society's decline, or does trust minimization heal it? If trust minimization heals it, by what mechanism? When is trust minimization good and when is it bad?

I think you're using the concept of "trust minimization" too loosely. Bitcoin does not try to create a world where people cannot trust each other. Bitcoin aims to design a monetary system that is robust against untrustworthy actors, which we all know exist.

Bitcoiners like the phrase "Bitcoin is trustless". But a better way to say this might be that Bitcoin is "game-theoretically secure". Bitcoin is a system that can work and produce socially desirable outcomes without requiring that the agents place trust in a small coalition of actors.

By contrast, fiat money requires the mass of agents to trust a subset of agents to act in a certain way. If the "trusted agents" do not act in the prescribed manner, then it leads to undesirable outcomes. If the mass of agents no longer trust the subset, then the entire system fails. Fiat is therefore not game-theoretically secure or robust.

102 sats \ 1 reply \ @snufon 11 May

The great aspect of decentralised protocols that do not require trust is that you choose wether you use it in a trustless or trusted manner! You can use the Internet by giving everything to Google but you are not forced to which is great. Bitcoin is the same, you can use an ETF if you trust the system or you can self custody.

This choice was not possible before, trying to escape inflation necessarily required you to use a broker which holds your stock or whatever for you. Or you could keep gold in your apartment but that's worse than Bitcoin for like 8 different reasons

2 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 11 May

For sure, trust minimized amounts to trust optional in practice.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury 11 May

There's a quote I read and can't attribute, but that I love:

It's fun to be a cad in a high-trust society.

So many layers. Worthy of deep meditation.

135 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b OP 11 May

Love it. I think I've seen you share it elsewhere.

Who doesn't want to punish cads?

It's probably also fun to be a saint in a high-trust society.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury 11 May

I didn't think about this till now, but this is really just an implicit prisoner's dilemma game, and cad-ness is basically defaulting on something on something of medium and below consequence; so the question is: when would you like to default? When everyone else is defaulting, or everyone else is cooperating?

The real essence of being a cad is that the defaults aren't so costly that really bad consequences ensue. If you're the only guy stealing pies from windowsills, they probably roll their eyes. If everyone is doing it, the pie-makers start shooting people.

Anyway, the real thing I came to say is this:

It's probably also fun to be a saint in a high-trust society.

Very possibly not. Don't have time to search for original text, but:

Durkheim imagines a ‘society of saints’ populated by perfect individuals. In such a society there might be no murder or robbery, but there would still be deviance. The general standards of behaviour would be so high that the slightest slip would be regarded as a serious offence. Thus the individual who simply showed bad taste, or was merely impolite, would attract strong disapproval.

From here. This is another idea taking up major real-estate in my head.

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b OP 12 May

When everyone else is defaulting, or everyone else is cooperating?

For the cad (if the game isn't iterated), always. Otherwise, I think people start defecting when they suspect everyone else is. If you'll be shot walking by windowsills, you might as well try to get a pie out of it.

Durkheim imagines a ‘society of saints’ populated by perfect individuals.

In a society with uniform behavior any variance "would attract strong disapproval," but that's mostly a function of its uniformity, isn't it? Both cooperative people and cads would prefer a society where people cooperate, because both stand to benefit from counterparties cooperating. That was my original point at least.

100 sats \ 2 replies \ @Se7enZ 11 May

Nice post. I've spent some time thinking about this over the last months. While trustless money is definitely something the world desperately needs, and a requirement as life moves more and more online, I feel like many people in this space get a little too carried away trying to eliminate trust entirely.

Trust is a necessity with regard to physical locality. Ones spouse, ones family, ones friends and neighbors. Trust is fundamental to intimacy and sexuality -- to relationships, to humanity. We are not going to do away with the need to trust and be vulnerable, but we can develop trustless tools to mitigate it where we don't have the means to build trust organically.

This viewpoint originally came up for me when trying to figure out how ecash and Fedimints could figure into Bitcoin philosophy for me.

Trust is a fundamental part of the human experience - we aren't going to do away with it, but we can mitigate the need for it where appropriate.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 11 May

I feel like many people in this space get a little too carried away trying to eliminate trust entirely.

It could be oversteer for sure.

This viewpoint originally came up for me when trying to figure out how ecash and Fedimints could figure into Bitcoin philosophy for me.

For many people these tools do seem to strike a balance they like.

Trust is a fundamental part of the human experience - we aren't going to do away with it, but we can mitigate the need for it where appropriate.

Absolutely, I guess I'm curious where trust is appropriate and where it isn't. I don't have a good framework for it.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Se7enZ 12 May

Absolutely, I guess I'm curious where trust is appropriate and where it isn't. I don't have a good framework for it.

Me neither, and it's tough to figure out. My current thinking is that trust is something that emerges from shared dependency and repeatable behavior. Perhaps frequency of interaction and degree of necessity might be inputs to a framework?

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @cristaiji 10 May

I think Harari must know that he’s talking out of his ass. No integrity. 😑

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @02bcd3eeb0 10 May

Obviously. He's speaking at a BIS summit - he has to suck their dicks. It's his business model.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Hamstr 11 May

@koob, you need to jump on nitter. 😂🤣 twitter sucks! Let's keep twitter's algo poor by not letting them see our third party cookies.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @SpaceHodler 11 May

Distrust is good when it comes to money. Because some people have a lot of wealth. If everybody were poor, it wouldn't be as important.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 10 May

I think it has more to do with the decline in morals. Not just trust, trust is a byproduct of morals. If you are someone with strong morals, then you inevitably become someone who is trustworthy.

10 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 10 May

the "good" forms of trust you allude to have a secondary function of building relationships in a community, which is valued as we are social animals.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @orthwyrm 10 May

(ignore this, sometimes i seem to get logged out mid-comment lol)

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b OP 10 May

Is this a bug or is it something with your setup?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 10 May

not entirely sure. i'll do some testing and get back to you...!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Kontext 11 May

A game that cannot be cheated (Bitcoin) REQUIRES you to be honest and to play according to the rules, creating trust within society. A game that can be cheated (fiat) WILL BE cheated, lies will be made up to justify the cheating, rules will be bent, creating distrust within society. Harari: "It's actually a good idea to give banks and governments the ability to create more and more money in order to build more trust in society." I mean this is just nonsensical... WHERE is this trust that the money printing has supposedly created? It's obvious he does not even live on this planet or, perhaps, has brain damage.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @Coinsreporter 11 May

Boo Marty! Banks have been the one and only mediator with only having one objective of cheating poor people. They have a only had one propoganda and that is about trust but they cheat innocent people.