100 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 18 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 2 bitcoin
If the old systems require more trust than the new systems? I'd find it easier to argue old systems require more trust. Mostly in the sense that new systems are more accountable (relatively) wrt to things like information latency. When Lyn was walking through examples of suftaja, it made me anxious to consider trading money for a cashier's check that I might be able to spend in 2 weeks at my destination. In the unhappy path, it'd take me 4 weeks to confront the original merchant I received the suftaja from.
Exchange is what comes to mind. Specially exchange of bitcoin for assets that bitcoin isn't aware of.
This was harder to answer than I want to admit. If we take trust in things that bitcoin the systems depends on as given, like the internet, bitcoin is trustless in only a handful of important ways:
- issuance
- storage
- transfer
Mostly in the sense that new systems are more accountable (relatively) wrt to things like information latency.
That's true -- the main thing I had in mind was that new-style systems are process-oriented and relatively tightly-specified, which we might default to thinking of as requiring less trust; but if you get caught between the cracks somehow, you're doomed. If you have an issue that the system cannot process, or that falls outside the greased rails, you can be disappeared from it; whereas the older systems seem to have more dependence on actual human relationships. But I'm not sure how convincing I find that argument to be.
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It's like we traded deep trust in a few institutions/individuals for a shallow breadth of trust in many layers of institutions/individuals.
The new system spreads trust around to the point where we're probably subject to more breaches of trust, but the breaches are smaller and trust violators are more easily replaced - which seems to sum to more efficient markets.
So maybe trust isn't being removed and instead it's being dispersed and displaced.
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I like this idea of redistributing trust. It gives you the mental toolkit to ask: where did this trust migrate? instead of getting wrapped around the axle of talking about trust vs trustlessness. And that, once you can start to talk about its migration, you might figure out what the new trust distribution portends.
One thing that jumps out at me: the core devs are the recipients of such a massive amount of trust, not in the sense that a bad actor could introduce a bug or an evil feature -- I guess that's possible, but the level of oversight vs such things is so high, that I don't worry about it. But rather: the devs choose what to work on, and they have a lot of influence with their peers, and these things, little by little, shape the values of the entire ecosystem.
Imagine if more of the early devs would have found the big block argument to be the more compelling one? There are certainly credible arguments to be made. Everything is tradeoffs, and one can hold a totally legit big-block position. That version of bitcoin would be very different one and portend different things in the world, and so that is a very powerful, trusted position. It's just not the flavor of trust that we're used to thinking about -- it dispersed in a new direction.
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