I Have Trust Issues, Crypto Baby Can You Help Me?

Tackling building trust in trustless by Amelia Guertin

In 2008, Satoshi wrote the infamous bitcoin white paper, proposing a system that would be anchored in “cryptographic proof instead of trust” or “In Code We Trust”. While this solution makes sense with the modern day erosion of trust in our society, it overlooks the reality that we, as humans, have different levels of psychological needs. As we build our way to a decentralized, decon-trust-ed reality, there is a case to be made for why we need to support the humans behind the screens in our community with resources, networks and relationships they can trust.

Welcome to the age of trust issues

I have trust issues. And, how could I not?

Over the past 10 years, as people witness the rise and fraudulent fall of financial systems, unbiased journalism and an ever-spreading swamp of corruption, misconduct and greed, psychologists have reported an unprecedented rise in trust issues. From anxiety to avoidance, trust issues can manifest in many different ways, and can have emotional and physical effects. At their worst, my trust issues have made me feel overwhelmed with emotion, paranoid, and unable to sleep with paralyzing body aches.

Social media — a never-ending scroll of perfect outfits, dinner parties and cats — often amplifies these feelings. Even when someone leaves a caption talking about the hardships in their lives, it’s accompanied by a perfectly imperfect carousel of photos of them looking chaotic — sure — but still attractive. How can you trust anyone’s authenticity in a world in which we’re all participating in a shared social contract of curating our lives to look a certain way? And, what happens when these actions lead to very real and, possibly, dangerous outcomes?

While my trust issues are something I’m actively working on, it did inspire a thought: could the promise of a trustless world resolve my trust issues forever?

Trust vs. trustless

In its simplest terms, trust is a confident reliance on a person or thing. It can be attached to an identifiable or unidentifiable entity and, like many things, it can be viewed on a spectrum along multiple dimensions.

Blockchain is “trustless” because people don’t need to place sole trust in any entity, intermediary, individual, institution, or third party for it to function. Instead, functionality and consensus are achieved through code, asymmetric cryptography, and protocols of the blockchain network itself. This creates a “trustless” architecture that enables trust in the network without the necessity of having to trust any individual actors.

In contrast to a traditional conception of trust, blockchain trust is a form of distributed trust that relies on processes of cognitive risk assessment by incentivizing good behavior and punishing bad behavior. This monitoring takes place transparently through traceability, with ex-ante risk reduced algorithmically to a degree of predictability.

The benefits of this trust-free functionality are broad. Essentially, we’ve coded our way out of needing to trust altogether. Hooray!

What happens when people don’t trust

Before you start celebrating the solutions our trusty developers have built to confront our collective trust issues, stop and consider: our systems might be powered by code, but who creates and enjoys the benefits? Humans. The question remains then whether a degree of trust is still needed, since the participants in the network — although anonymous — are nevertheless known for the most part to be human beings.

If a degree of trust is, in fact, still needed, then it would be an oversight for me not to acknowledge that Web3 hasn’t done a stellar job at building trust over the years. Just this year we’ve seen the likes of Celsius, Wormhole, Blu3 DAO issues and even the theft of Seth Green’s precious Bored Ape. Today, there are countless articles and even a publication dedicated to exposing industry scams and every crypto discord channel features warnings of malicious behavior to look out for. Personally, I’m riddled with fear every time I receive a DM and the last thing I will ever do is open a link — even from a friend.

As noted by Jena Marie Espelita in “Trusting a trustless network,” trust sometimes fails not because the parties to an arrangement are untrustworthy, but because the environment itself is unfavorable to conditions of trust. This means that despite the capacity, competency and willingness of actors to be trustworthy, there is a systemic failure that makes it unwise for anyone to trust.

This breakdown of trust has consequences. When humans don’t have trust — in institutions, systems, relationships, and themselves — it affects their well-being. Research has shown that men who cultivate trusting relationships live longer and are less likely to suffer from a heart attack, cancer, anxiety, or depression. Also, on average, they’re more successful and make more money.

Shifting trust

Rather than eliminating the need for trust altogether, many of us believe our systems have the ability to shift it. In fact, the entities individuals are placing their trust in today have already undergone a shift. Instead of trusting institutions, governments, and news sources, people view their friends and acquaintances on Facebook as twice as credible as government leaders. Big tech companies have begun capitalizing on this shift by unbundling traditional trust hierarchies and distributing trust through peer-to-peer networks. These companies are paving an opening for blockchain to be at the forefront of what people trust. And, as research confirms the addictive and negative psychological effects of technologies like apps, end consumers become wearier of the prioritization of profits over people in the way products are built by centralized tech companies. Our decentralized systems are poised to be the next trust winners. But how is the Web3 community doing at earning this trust? Well, not great, as we continue to follow similar patterns to our Web2 predecessors.

Yes, technology-wise we’re iterating in the right direction: our systems are still more secure, robust, and transparent than any traditional system. But, as mentioned, the foundation of our systems overlooks the muddled, chaotic, and exceedingly unpredictable element of human behavior present in each transaction — the same behavior that introduces the need for establishing trust. We are asking an entire population to trust fall into the hands of our technology. Don’t you think that fall would be a little more stable with a few other strong legs to stand on? What if we could build a new trustless trust architecture that shifts the onus of trust to an idea, community, process, and technology?

Building trust in trustless at Bundlr

Here are a few ways we are thinking about building a strong foundation of trust at Bundlr.

Trust in an idea: A trustless source of truth

At Bundlr, our vision is to decentralize the world’s data, by creating a trustless source of truth because we believe that everyone should have access to publicly available information and be able to control privately owned information. This is a large shift from the current state of the data economy, and our team recognizes the need for the greater community to have trust that a trustless source of truth is safe and worth preserving. To fill the gap, our team has been focused on developing what a trustless source of truth means, what is required to get there and how it can change our lives. We have also asked our community to hold us accountable if our innovations stray from the higher collective vision.

Trust in people: Core team and community

Anytime new community members discover Bundlr, we know that it’s as if they were to enter a new room filled with strangers. Sure there might be familiar virtual faces but we know that it will require work to ensure that they feel welcomed and want to become long-term community members. There is a diverse array of individuals that join from developers to network participants and even end users who are all passionate about the greater vision. Our focus has been to establish the norms of the community early and often, be transparent through proactive communication, and create a space where there is a sense of belonging. Creating the space means spending time understanding the diverse needs of the community while allowing fluidity for sub-communities to arise. Our core team shares personal experiences and are open to new ideas or suggestions. We know that integrity and reputation are everything. That’s why every member of our core team creates a V2MoM that aligns with our core values. By leading with our values internally, we demonstrate them externally.

Trust in the process: Driving towards a decentralized network

As we drive towards creating a decentralized network, we know that we need to build trust around the process that will get us there. What does decentralization mean for Bundlr and how are we going to get there? We plan to clearly communicate the answers to both questions and demonstrate the applicability in our network mechanisms. There has been a lot of learnings from other networks that we are applying to our process. Our network values governance and we plan to avoid centralization through hyper-compliance by our core team. While it’s been proven that central authorities can establish trust early among a group of followers, our goal is to shift that mentality toward trusting the network by promoting the methodology and mechanisms behind it. Our network will be decentralized, censorship-resistant, transparent, and incentivized. No special privileges will be given to specific participants, making access equitable for all.

Trust in the technology: Your innovative data network

Today, our community trusts us to provide permanent storage that is infinitely scalable, performant, and composable. Bundlr can easily integrate with any application while providing testing flexibility to builders. Our network scales indefinitely, increasing the number of transactions per second(tps) and transaction finality. The trust in our technology also relates back to the most basic needs of making sure that it is secure and reliable. Not only does Bundlr inherit the security of Arweave’s blockweave, but we also take measures to lower the risk of security hacks. We are proud that Bundlr has had virtually no downtime and we continue to work on performance enhancements to ensure this is consistent. In the future, we are committed to building the highest quality data infrastructure, that reflects the needs of our builders, and will ultimately get us to a trustless source of truth for all data. Check out our community AMAs every Tuesday and our roadmap for updates.

We believe that the above attributes will create the sturdy legs needed for our community to confidently want to trust fall into our network arms. We don’t plan to stop with the above, as trust can be built over a lifetime, yet lost in a second.

From trustless to trustworthy

It’s not surprising that eliminating the need for trust has been our approach thus far. Why? Because as I mentioned at the beginning, trust is a spectrum with many different variables. Variables such as vulnerability and irrationality are difficult to code into our systems and, therefore, so is trust. My argument is on behalf of the humans who have built and scaled our vibrant community to what it is today. I believe investing in trust on a human level is what will take our community to the next level of innovation — by centering relationships and enhancing transparency, proactive communication, and a diversity of thought.

About Amelia

Amelia Guertin is the Chief Operating Officer at Bundlr, a data network with a vision to decentralize the world’s data, providing an open, transparent, trustless source of truth to protect humanity and ultimately set them free. Bundlr is optimized for performance, infinite scalability with unlimited storage and composability, allowing users to sign and pay in the 14 tokens we support.

Prior to joining Bundlr, Amelia held roles at Coinbase, Snowflake, Salesforce, and Scotiabank. Her diverse background and ability to synchronize creativity with structure allows her to think out of the box to develop and execute strategies. Whilst her experiences have allowed her to live all over the world, Amelia is proud to have grown up bilingual in Canada.

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