hottakes

protocols

notes on protocols, language and cryptography —

"People who work in cryptography often talk about trustless protocols, but what they mean is: cryptography scales trust. At the most abstract level, cryptography allows us to replace other forms of trust with trust in math. Or put another way, the trust isn’t eliminated. It just moves to a different part of the system, a part which can be scaled."

https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/cryptography-scales-trust

Cryptography doesn't scale trust, it scales the illusion that trust is something you don't have to worry about anymore and can offload to math. 
Those who blindly believe this are also the ones who are dumbfounded when they are rugged, because they bought into all these buzzwords telling them otherwise.
Maybe the network is more secure, but people's brains aren't. As long as you can socially engineer people, it doesn't matter what cryptography does for the illusion of trust.

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Was reacting to the quote you pulled "cryptography scales trust", and took it as a blanket statement of everything it's connected to in this space.

agree, never believe anything blindly - preferably do your own research.  

btw I guess this text is not primarily about trust between people (the crypto space suffers from the lack of social trust just like other communities), but more about the trust in the tools - components of shared consensus protocols, distributed systems and their ability to scale

100%. same applies for DAOs and onchain governance - you can improve the technology but are still going to face the same human problems of dysfunction, pettiness, corruption, etc. that have existed in politics for centuries