My parents never had much
they risked everything they had to emigrate from India to the US
in search of a better life
and when I was born, they loved me unconditionally
no matter what happened in my life
I always knew I that could trust them
In fact I first learned what it meant "Trust" with my relationship with them
trust is the foundation of every human connection
culture, community, in fact our entirely civilization depends on trust
it's the ability to predict what others will do
it governs every interaction we have with humans
in personal relationships, trust means exposing yours vulnerabilities to someone
and believing that they wouldn't take advantge of that openess
When you first meet someone you can't predict towards that relationship will go
but if you're willing to give them your trust
you can get to know them
their hopes and fears, their wild streams and their darkest secrets
and as all that trust compounds overtime
the benefits of closeness and intimacy
far outweight the possibility of pain and betrayal
part of the human condition is to make predictions
we are constantly forecasting ahead by building internal models of the world
based both on our experiences and what others tell us
then use this to guess what will happen next
we trust that people will take their responsabilities seriously
that they'll abide by whatever rules apply to the task at hand
we trust teachers to educate our children
chefs to serve us sanitary food and co-workers to do their part we've collectively
built systems of trust all around us to facilitate our interactions with each
other and the data shows that in countries where people highly trust each
other there also tends to be low levels of income inequality as well as high
levels of political and economic stability so how do we know who to trust
a 17th century English philosopher named Thomas Hobbes argued that in order to
maintain civil peace and social unity in a society there needed to be some kind
of sovereign power responsible for protecting the security of the
common wealth and granted absolute authority to ensure the common defense
he called this power the Leviathan the first Leviathan was organized religion
the idea was that if people put all their trust in God and followed his will
on how to interact with others they'd behave themselves but soon another
Leviathan emerged the nation states it offered to handle the complexities of
managing society through the creation of laws and the enforcement of those laws
via a uniformed police force but now we are witnessing the rise of a new
Leviathan the network with the rise of the network anyone in the world can
communicate with anyone else and because of that we also now have the ability to
trust anyone in the world Trust was once an expensive pursuit in order to convey
it banks elite schools and government offices were built from luxurious
materials to declare solidity and tradition but the network has changed
all of that now we're prepared to place our lives in
the hands of people we know nothing about because of the emergence of
networked services that enable two strangers to trust each other we share a
rise with uber stay in homes with Airbnb hire workers with Upwork the list goes
on these services have codified reputation
they built webs of trust the number of stars next to someone's name makes it
possible to trust them even though we've never met them but these systems of
trust we've created have been abused many governments across the world have
shown that they can't be held trustworthy the series of pro-democracy
protests across the Middle East known as the Arab Spring
were hampered when local governments cut off the protesters internet access the
Chinese government routinely censors data from its populace which accounts
for about a fifth of the world and even in more developed countries like the
u.s. trust in the federal government is at an all-time low as income inequality
continues to rise this has led to the rise of the incubate Trump with his
diehard followers demanding he drained the swamp the corporation's that have
built on the neutral playing field of the web
now own most of our personal data and we've learned that several of them have
breached our trust in many ways using personal data and time and time again
corporate banks have stolen money from countless people and influenced the
direction of entire governments with the power we've entrusted in them the sheer
size of these institutions we built make the situation look hopeless competing
with the government banking cartel is illegal and can be severely punished
they define monetary policy and our need to use money that depends on them has
become our straightjacket but a few years ago a paper was posted in a
cryptography mailing list detailing a system called Bitcoin that could
challenge the most powerful monopolies in the world it was the first system to
show that it was possible for two people to exchange value over the Internet
without the need to trust a third party like a bank Bitcoin currently has a
market cap of 80 billion dollars and has remained secure after all these years
soon people started wondering what if the underlying technology of Bitcoin
could be used to remove the need for a trusted third party in other areas the
blockchain bitcoins data structure and its associated proof-of-work algorithm
are starting to be applied to other concepts insurance law healthcare
anywhere where a risky amount of trust is involved can be a space where
blockchain technology can improve the system by offloading some of the Trust's
necessary from humans to machines for example there's a blockchain enabled
micro grid service in Brooklyn that lets individuals sell their excess solar
energy directly to neighbors without involving a central utility company we
can create new organizations like this that are distributed and autonomous
systems that are open trustless and meritocratic with humans at the edges and
automation at the center but last year we learned something really important
one of the most popular blockchain communities Etherium second only to
Bitcoin and market cap hard forked what that means is after a hacker stole
60 million dollars with their internal currency the
community collectively made a controversial decision to rewind the
blockchain so the money would go back to the original owners this shocked many
people in the wider community since one of the core characteristics of a
blockchain is its ability to remain immutable the hard fork proved that
block chains are not in fact immutable and it also proves something much more
significant that the blockchain is not in fact a trustless system yes we don't
have to trust any one party like a bank to utilize it but we do trust three
parties when you hold cryptocurrency in your wallet you are trusting the miners
to secure the network and validate transactions the developers to maintain
and improve the code and the users to use the platform so you're not trusting
one party you're trusting the entire community block chains don't offer a
trustless system but rather a reassignment of trust amongst many
parties instead of one the more distributed the trust is the more the
risk of fraud decreases so instead of building systems that try to eliminate
trust maybe we should build systems that strengthen it not more trust less but
more trust ful imagine apps that are run by the community that uses them that
means a rider in a driver not needing a for-profit third party to help them find
and trust each other or a consumer owning their own demographic profile and
choosing what to disclose to service providers in exchange for economic value
so while Trust is necessary in every interaction we have with humans there
are many cases where minimising it is beneficial and we can use blockchain
technology to do that but the need to trust won't go away and that's okay we
can't escape human reliance as fallible and imperfect as we are there will
always be some risk involved in our interaction with humans and the higher the risk the
higher the reward as we build better systems that nurture and nourish trust
we'll be able to extend our capabilities in every way by augmenting our
intelligence with the power of the web becoming ever more connected with each
other and when I think back to the dreams my
dad had for me as a child or the ones that all the eager young developers I've
met have for success or the ones I have in my most intimate relationships
I realize that trust can be the bridge between where we are now and where we
all want to be. HOME.
Hey guys hope you liked the video the winner of last
week's coding challenge is Zacharias Böhler. Zacharias created a decentralized
machine learning journal using IPFS so awesome I've already bookmarked this for
my own use he's got some great documentation too so definitely check it
out very well done and the runner-up is Anup Ghatage who created a decentralized
dropbox on IPFS very ambitious