Sally StrangeReading about bitcoin and blockchain. Much of the interest and/or hype around blockchain involves what its advocates call "trustless" systems. Here's how "Ukezi Ebenezer" (sounds like a nom de plume, but who knows) explained it:
"A trustless system is a system that does not rely on actors to behave in a certain way for the intended result to occur. The system executes the action without relying on humans to do so. There is no intermediary party, like a bank or broker, moderating the event. You don’t have to worry if the person you’re interacting with can be trusted. The system creates trust for you."
Honestly this sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. No intermediary, no humans involved, means nobody who can explain it, nobody who can fix it, nobody to whom people can appeal when things go wrong.
And they're not actually talking about eliminating trust. They're talking about distributing trust. Making it so that, instead of trusting one or two bankers, you're trusting in thousands, maybe millions of other people to use the system rationally and spot errors when they occur.
The techbro obsession with eliminating humans is not good. You can't actually eliminate humans. Someone still has to service and maintain the system. It's foolishness for humans to try to eliminate humans from any system that's built for humans to use.
No wonder they have weird fantasies about uploading themselves to the mainframe.
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