Trust is one of the most important elements of life, maybe even something we cannot survive without. Behind trust lay many interesting layers, for instance, responsibility. Who is to blame when something goes wrong, as it always does? Loss in trust can lead to loss in faith and confidence, and even a collapse in powerful relationships and systems. Once gone, it can be very difficult to rebuild. Currently, trust in all our 4 major institutions: government, media, business, and NGOs, is at an all time low. But, can trust truly disappear? Or, like energy, does it just change forms? As we now race to put our faith in algorithms over humans in our daily lives, what is the likely outcome? Is technology more trustworthy than humanity? What are the critical elements and outcomes of the shift in trust we are already deep into? What are the aspects of distributed trust that we need to understand when pursuing our Blockchain goals?

Parallel to the 4th Industrial Revolution, we are at the outset of the 3rd trust Revolution. Trust used to only flow upwards, towards experts, referees, gatekeepers, and others at a hierarchical layer above us. Now, it flows horizontally and dynamically from peer to peer.

When looking at the shift to distributed trust, we must swim out a bit into the cultural and social revolution that we’re currently in. It is beyond business processes, models, and technology, and actually about us and how we will live from this point forward. In Satoshi’s words, ‘the root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work’.

In times characterized by VUCA, people open up to alternatives - and this is one of the reasons why Blockchain holds such power. For the first time in the history of mankind we have the potential to create a permanent decentralized public record of who owns what and where we can all reliably agree on the correctness of what is written. Blockchain puts its faith in mathematics instead of the ‘God’ that we used to Trust. But, how far are we ready to go down that rabbit hole? Can human trust really be replaced by distributed technical trust? How can we start redesigning systems that put people first that are more honest, inclusive and accountable?