Tag Archives: bitcoin

Bitcoin and “trustless trust”

This article from Beautiful Data-R talks about how Bitcoin’s algorithms are supposed to generate trust:

The crypto-currency Bitcoin and the way it generates “trustless trust” is one of the hottest topics when it comes to technological innovations right now. The way Bitcoin transactions always backtrace the whole transaction list since the first discovered block (the Genesis block) does not only work for finance. The first startups such as Blockstream already work on ways how to use this mechanism of “trustless trust” (i.e. you can trust the system without having to trust the participants) on related fields such as corporate equity.

It’s an interesting idea – can we design better markets such that participation in the market pushes people toward more trustworthy or ethical behavior? Could you build carbon credits or “embodied energy” values into such a market, for example? This sounds a lot like Adam Smith’s invisible hand – markets themselves were supposed to do this, but the problem today is that there are too many people (living and future) and plants and animals being harmed by markets without participating in them.