I believe

An old turnip farmer falls upon hard times. One day, a wealthy merchant pays him a visit and asks for a turnip. Rather perplexed, the old man rummages in his sack, and provides one.

“What did you do that for, Dad?” asks his daughter, “you don’t even like turnips. And you are a wealthy man. You could buy any number of turnips from the grocer down the road. Why impose your will on this poor old fellow?
“Because now I am in his debt,” replies the merchant, ”and now he needs not feel shame to ask a favour of me.”

The Devil’s Advocate™ Go Premium In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

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 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. It is to make oneself vulnerable for the betterment of all. It explains the fable of the wealthy merchant who accosts the elderly pauper.

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. Hence, a millenarian yen to rid the present system of the need for trust, replacing it with technology. To be clear here: distributed ledgers do not reinforce trust between transactors: they eliminate the need for it.

So in the same way that rules, playbooks and policies override the judgment of and confidence in individuals using them — thereby deprecating those individuals and stunting their ability to connect on an emotional level — the will to eliminate trusted intermediaries in a distributed ledger system has the same fundamental shortcoming.

Trust is a feature, not a bug.

By way of analogy, converting a moral obligation to someone else (say, “pick your children up promptly at the conclusion of today’s kindergarten session”) into a financial one (if you arrive more than ten minutes after the session ends, you will be charged a late collection fee) has the same effect. Now there is a price on your time: I can pay for my delinquency without compunction.

Social relationships, friendships and emotional connections — which modernists view as irrelevant at best, or more likely indications of graft or nepotism in the system — in fact have a perfectly sensible role: they reinforce bonds of trust between participants.

now to be sure: this may be unfair to outsiders who don’t have those connections or any way of making them — but the answer is to create opportunities for those at the margins, who might otherwise be disenfranchised (as they are systematically deprived of the opportunities to enter the market in favour of insiders) to build those social relations. For example: be imaginative about your hiring choices. Why do you reflexively hire from magic circle firms and Russell Group universities? but a decentralised ledger where no-one needs to trust others in the market is hardly a decent no substitute. You cannot banish bonds of trust.

The answer is not to prevent these activities, but create alternative structures which lower the barriers to entry into relations of trust for those without the necessary connections.