Hacker News Reader

Everyone is a potential threat, that's the whole point of trust in the first place. If that wasn't the case, trust (in terms of safety) wouldnt even be a thing.

View on HN

Not if you reframe it as the absence of mistrust, trusting being the natural state.

Trusting blindly is not a natural state. We evolved in the ecosystem you see around you. In freak cases, eg. the dodo bird, you can see what happens when blind trust meets competition.

I think this is why it is problematic these days. Trust in simple terms would be trusting your local community but not the 'outside' world. But now we're trying to make the whole world one community, so who to distrust? Everyone, because you don't actually really know many people at all 'inside' your community. Everyone is inside and outside at once.

It feels like blockchain is trying to be a solution for the 'global community' that can't trust itself, but will never solve that problem because it's inherently an unsolvable utopian dream.

Isn’t it fundamentally an artifact of scarcity? What if with technological advances in automation and energy sources humanity were approaching a world without it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com