Usually, I use evolution. But that indicates a forward movement, and in this case, I am not so sure now! I had a thought on how the notion of trust in transactions has changed, and felt that I should document it, even if it’s in a super simplistic way!<\/p>\n
1. It began with a producer\/consumer\u00a0– consumer\/producer relationship in the form of barter.<\/p>\n
2. A central currency suddenly opened up trade and now it could just be producer – consumer<\/p>\n
3. That also meant that a middleman could enter the system, hence a producer – seller – consumer<\/p>\n
4. Somewhere in between there was a commoditisation of manufacturing, which meant the seller, and by extension the consumer, was placing trust in a centralised, physical, non human entity (the manufacturer brand) at the point of production<\/p>\n
5. The aggregators of manufactured\u00a0product(s) sales went through consolidation cycles to form retail chains. Now the consumer was trusting a centralised, physical, non human entity (the retail chain brand) at the point of purchase as well<\/p>\n
6. Meanwhile, sellers also started trusting centralised currency that wasn’t cash, thanks to payment middlemen (banks, credit cards, paypal etc)<\/p>\n
7. Then came the internet. It killed a bunch of seller middlemen and set up its own. The consumer now began trusting a non physical, non human, centralised entity to transact with, using primarily centralised non cash currency mechanisms. In fact, so does the seller.<\/p>\n
8. Enter the blockchain. We will now trust the technology for the transactions – a decentralised, non physical, non human entity.<\/p>\n
We’re mechanising what we might call integrity. Where will we go next?<\/p>\n
P.S. If you want to explore\u00a0a few contrasting viewpoints on this subject, try<\/p>\n
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future<\/a><\/p>\n The blockchain does not eliminate the need for trust<\/a> and Why Bitcoin is not trustless<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The notion of trust has seen tectonic shifts across time. A simplistic look at the changes that have happened, and a quick peek at how a technology like blockchain can be framed in this context. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[5268,1301,1452,4446,4367,653],"class_list":["post-12571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-future","tag-blockchain","tag-consumption","tag-currency","tag-trade","tag-transaction","tag-trust"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12571"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13281,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12571\/revisions\/13281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}