In many countries, the richest companies operate unethically, with impunity because the legal system is in the pocket of a corrupt few in power. In such countries trust in institutions is nonexistent. In developed economies, regulatory capture still leads to inequities and gross inefficiencies.
Today on the internet, reviews and product search results can no longer be trusted. For a very long while, buying from a large class of products on Amazon was a gamble. A breakdown in reputation and curation.
Computing environments were originally high trust, a property they could not retain at scale. Encryption, https everywhere, anti-ad tracking, secure VMs, gated app stores, "Don't trust the client" designs, onion routers, anti binary blobs are technologies and principles which reduce the need for trust. Technologies like DRM, copy protection rootkits and Trusted Computing are corporations communicating their lack of trust in humans inhumanly.
There's always some minimal amount of trust necessary. The optimal minimum generally decreases with scale. Hawala might seem an exception but closer inspection shows it depends on shared belief systems, local interactions on reputation networks and honor; memes which reduce trust burden at scale.
I'd also argue bitcoin isn't about trust but about issues which arise with open permissions and no centralized enforcement mechanism. Its throughput issues addressed by "layer 2" solutions, as decentralized credit networks (from a dispute and authority perspective), actually have fair overlap with honor based informal money transfer systems but without the centuries to have ironed out issues.
Many of the things that scale is being forced into don't actually increase their net benefit to the people with scale (usually it is the opposite when you consider the requisite slavery/coups/wars/etc. to provide the infrastructure and labour), merely the amount that can be extracted by some centralized entity.
Question: how would you do that without rent-extracting middlemen? And even if you are willing to accept a middlemen, why do you think this type of service is not available today? Assume that all the legal barriers for it could be removed - your insurance policy gives you exemption to this and you can have a standard contract defining what would happen in case someone driving your car got involved in an accident, or if you car got stolen by a driver, etc.
If you think that doing that with a car is too complicated, or if you are a cycling advocate: same thing, but for bikes.
Just to make my point explicit: the idea of "trustlessness" is not to get rid of the "trust" in the existing activities that can be handled at the local/"human" scale. The idea is to be able to enable these kind of activities at the higher levels that the institutions (formal or informal) can not cover. If there are things that we can do without a blockchain, great! But think of all the applications that can not be done at all today just because we don't have the tools to enforce the "rules" at a larger scale.
Edit: Okay. I am checking Turo now, I wasn't aware of them. Still, they are a middleman between car owner and driver, right? How do they make money?
Edit 2: Reading from their website, it seems like they are focusing on being a rental aggregator. All the talk about "building your business" seems to indicate their cars are not from individual owners that actually use the car. So, no, I wouldn't say they qualify as an alternative to what I am talking about.
Middleman add value by dealing with edge cases and aggregating trust. They aren’t pure rent extractors.
We had hyper well defined ride sharing system with clear rules unbiased rules, high anonymity, focused on individual providers prior to Uber and Lyft- Taxis. People hated it, as it was rife with little abuses. Uber, Lyft, and similar provide a ton of value by brokering trust between the provider and rider.
An Uber or a Lyft will actually show up - and quickly - when I call it; will actually take me where I want to go without wasting time running up the meter; and will actually charge me in a fair and predictable way, which does not involve dickering with the driver or unexpectedly having to find a bunch of cash because the card reader is "broken".
All of these things can be reasonably summarized as forms of trustworthiness.
To get this, all it was needed was to have a protocol, namely the Automatic Market Maker system popularized by Uniswap.
Protocol is what we need, not platforms.
One protocol being developed to deal with conflict resolution is https://kleros.io. A decentralized car sharing company could work initially just like a regular car-rental company, by having the renter providing an deposit to cover for damages and refunded when the vehicle is returned in acceptable conditions. In case of small disputes, a pre-arranged third party works as a arbiter. And in the case where there are some serious problems, actual courts and the "traditional" institutions should be there to execute their role.
The key to building trust online is to recreate some of these aspects. You should have an identity in the community that you belong to and you should own assets under that identity so you can’t easily abandon it and start somewhere else with your ill gotten gains. Communication amongst members of the community should be easy and common. There should even be shared ownership of community assets and the community should provide services to its members.
I imagine this looking something like a discord server combined with some of the hosting features of FB like image sharing, posts, groups, etc. You’d also need a built in token that could be used within the community but also exchanged on a broader network of federated communities.
This drive to atomize humanity and make all relationships fungible is insane, and the only benefit is it allows long distance fuedalism.
The problem with trust, is that its awesome until it aint. When we are deaing with gov policy, billions of dollars, war, your life savings,etc a break in trust is beyond costly, making the use cost of a slower but secure blockchain the responsible thing to do.
Actully, this is basically what’s happening in your example.
The citizens of the wealthiest countries are participating in the war by sending armaments and aid to Ukraine. The majority of the world’s citizens* are sitting it out or providing some amount of assistance to the Russian side, mainly through commerce.
It’s not on the blockchain, but essentially wealth is “voting”.
FWIW I’m far, far from being a blockchain supporter. I’m just addressing your example.
* yes, at the UN the majority states voted against Russia, but if you look by populations, the west won an “electoral college” victory on the topic.
A small number of people with lots of resources choose whether a large number of people with few resources fight each other to the death.
GGP implied that war was something a blockchain could “fix”, but GP argues that it, at best, it maintains the status quo.
In my opinion, it’s a little worse than the status quo because at least before those with few resources got some small say in the matter via their elected representatives.
Imagine if when you pushed the “buy now” button on Amazon it took seconds for the transaction to complete. You’d stop using Amazon.