Can Ethereum become a complete Substitute for Human trust?

cuddaloreappu

" Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair" -That's Human trust.

In Ethereum we trust contracts and algorithms..

Ethereum which now begins as a simple financial and social contracts, down the road will or can it become a complete alternative or substitute for all human trust?

avsa

I believe ethereum is part of the repairing process of trust. Snowden's revelations, security breaches in almost all sites, MtGox like implosions are testimonials that our trust model is broken. Trusting humans might work when there are 150 humans in your community and they can't really go very far, but this doesn't scale well to 8 billion humans..

lunchtime

You could be on to something here. If I'm about to do business with someone, but based on their previous transcations and using a reputation service I can see that they don't always pull through, I may reconsider my deal with them.

bcurdy

Ethereum (and crpytocurrencies at large) are between the "technology trigger" and the "peak of inflated expectations" phases in the technology hype cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle).

We still don't know what their true potential is. It might be even bigger than we imagine. However, I would put replacing trust altogether at the top of the inflated expectations curve, just like replacing national currencies is for bitcoin. Trust and money are social constructs, technology can help managing them but it can not solve all of their challenges.

Jasper

When you have trustless mechanisms, you can interact with people you would otherwise not trust to have those interactions with. But you do 'get a feel of them', so that is how silicon-computed trust can help extent brain-computed trust.

On the other hand, it might also increase the standard of when to trust people.

blkcmb

I would suggest that perhaps the task of decoupling humanity from its traditional concepts of money is far greater than most realize. Bitcoin represents a monumental leap forward in monetary science. That's hard enough for most people to grasp. I don't think it will be possible to change humanity as a whole in the near term. That seems like a multi generational process to me, I can't imagine Ethereum significantly disrupting traditional constructs of human trust any time soon.

aatkin

By using ethereum or another crypto platform you are merely substituting trust in one "stack" of entities for another (slide 7): http://www.slideshare.net/aatkin1971/trustdavis-on-ethereum?qid=4a2c1970-b553-4e0a-9a0a-df1fee5a216d&v=default&b=&from_search=1