I believe

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I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.

I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.

I believe for everyone who goes astray, someone will come to show the way

—Roger Whittaker

Credit: Latin, vb (3rd pers. sing.): He, she or it believes.

TL;DR: A feature, not a bug.

Trust: a fundamental part of every legal, political, and financial system that has ever existed and one the need for which cannot be dissolved by technology. Trust converts the single-round prisoner’s dilemma — in which a rational homo economicus would, and therefore should, throw her co-conspirator under the bus — to the iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in which the longer term benefits of not doing that outweigh the undeniable headrush it provides in short term. If you know you will see her again, and go through this again — or even if you aren’t pretty sure you won’t — the rational thing is to cooperate, at least as long as your co-conspirator does.

Trust is a moral imperative, not a legal one. It derives its power from the very fact that it is not backed by any obligation. It is not a compulsion; it is a voluntary submission to the mercy of a third party in the hope of a reciprocal submission back.

Other variations:

A gentleman’s word is his bond.

“I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one-hundred per cent.”

To trust someone is to take a risk.

Prevailing orthodoxy is to taxonomise, categorise, and eliminate every foible, variable, weakness, and risk, as you go, delimiting, boxing, reducing and bit-crushing risks down into their smallest components. “By so isolating and atomising risks,” the orthodox are prone to say, “you eliminate them, you see.”

A great risk in the system is that posed by humans beings: all their inconstancy, unreliability, stupidity or mendacity. Thus, eliminating risk tends to be conflated with eliminating individuals, or at least the need to trust them. In this contrarian’s opinion, The Root of All Evil in the present system is any device which seeks to substitute data, policy, rule, or algorithm for judgement, confidence, and trust.

So in the same way that rules, playbooks and policies override the judgment of and confidence in individuals, the desire to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries in a distributed Ledger system has the same fundamental shortcoming.

By way of analogy, the conversion of a moral obligation (pick your children up promptly at the conclusion of today's session) with a financial one parents will be charged £10 per hour for late collection of children after the session) has the same effect.

Contrarian view: aspects of social relations like friendships, marketing, vacation placements with colleagues' children, which are today seen as an acceptable nepotism and indications of unfairness in the system, in fact tend to reinforce bonds of trust and confidence between existing market participants. This may be inequitable for new entrants to the market and those who have been disenfranchised (as they are systematically deprived of these opportunities to enter the market in favour of insiders) but they do tend to increase general levels of trust amongst those participants in the market

The answer maybe not to prevent these activities, but to try to ensure equivalents are put in place for those without the necessary connections.

What things tend to substitute financial for moral obligations? Contracts. Laws. Regulations. Code.