Trustlessness

Trust is a good thing, right?

As children, we trust our parents to take care of us. We trust our teachers, doctors, and coaches to help us out in the right situation. These authority figures help us navigate the world very early on, and we often assume what they’re doing is in our best interest.

When we’re a bit older, we still have trust for individuals. We need to trust whoever is driving the car we’re riding in, and if that car needs regular maintenance, we trust our auto mechanics to take care of things. You probably have a mentor or a close friend you trust, and I love being able to trust my accountant to file taxes on my behalf.

You still trust a few people when you get older, but over time, your trust in systems increases while your trust in individuals decreases. You don’t have a relationship with your bank teller so much as you have a relationship with your bank.

Childhood trust is primal and physical. Adult trust is mechanical and transactional. Nevertheless, we tend to take both kinds of trust for granted.

You’re thinking: wait a minute. I trust the person who built my house to ensure that the roof won’t fall on my head. I trust that my dentist will actually clean my teeth and not put a bunch of extra refined sugar on them when I’m not looking. Adult trust in individuals is a big part of life.

Actually, these are examples of trust in a system, not in an individual. The system provides repercussions when individuals behave badly, like with my roofman or sugar-dentist examples.

There’s nowhere this is more obvious than with money.

It used to be exchangeable for gold, but today we use fiat money—money backed by trust in a government. Even when dollars could be swapped neatly for gold, money still needed trust to work. For those who accepted the money, they had to trust that they could spend that money eventually.

What if you didn’t have to have that trust in people or institutions? That’s the idea behind a trustless transaction.

This doesn’t mean that we have to be cynical and get rid of all the trust on planet Earth! Instead, this concept is all about not being forced to trust any one individual or institution.

One obvious example of trustlessness in the modern world is Bitcoin. There’s no middleman in between you and another person (or institution) any time you’re sending or receiving money. This isn’t anything like sending money through Venmo or PayPal, where your payment goes in one end and out the other after a company decides whether or not to approve it.

Now, I’m not here advising anyone to buy crypto or to become a crypto bro! This is just me being drawn to the word trustless.