You can’t democratise trust

I have a new post on the Deloitte Digital blog.

There’s been a lot of talk about using technology to democratise trust, and much of it shows a deep misunderstanding of just what trust is. It’s implicitly assumed that trust is a fungible asset, something that can be quantified, captured and passed around via technology. This isn’t true though.

As I point out in the post:

Trust is different to technology. We can’t democratise trust. Trust is a subjective measure of risk. It’s something we construct internally when we observe a consistent pattern of behaviour. We can’t create new kinds of trust. Trust is not a fungible factor that we can manipulate and transfer.

Misunderstanding trust means that technical solutions are proposed rather than tackling the real problem. As I conclude in the post:

If we want to rebuild trust then we need to solve the hard social problems, and create the stable, consistent and transparent institutions (be they distributed or centralised) that all of us can trust.

Technology can enable us to create more transparent institutions, but if these institutions fail to behave in a trustworthy manner then few will trust them. This is why the recent Ethereum hard fork is interesting. Some people wanted an immutable ledger, and they’re now all on ETC as they no longer trust ETH. Others trust the Ethereum Foundation to “do the right thing by them” and they’re now on ETH, and don’t trust ETC.