Trustless

“There are no such thing as zero trust assumptions.”

Trustless is a confusing word: We don’t use it in common speech; it means “not trust worthy” in the dictionary; decentralized technologies sometimes use it as “not needing to trust”; and the uninitiated might interpret it to mean that it’s advocating for less trust?

Despite the confusion, there is a very useful insight behind the concept of “trustless” (in the decentralization sense). To understand it, let’s suspend our immediate reaction and break down two interesting properties behind this concept: Explicit trust and immutable trust.

Our goal is not to reduce the amount of trust in the world, but rather to create more and better trust that we can use to create more powerful and interesting systems.

Consider a typical intimate relationship: We can create more and better trust through communication–setting expectations and being clear about our boundaries, allowing us to thrive even in more complicated and non-traditional arrangements.

Let’s try to build a framework for doing this when designing other kinds of systems.

Immutable and Mutable

To trust something mutable is to understand that it can change. To trust something immutable is to understand that it cannot change. We’ll explore how we can plan for and benefit from both scenarios.

When the CEO of a company makes a promise, we need to remember that it’s not the individual making a lifelong commitment. The Chief Executive Officer is a role within a company. One day it can be Dick, next day it can be Parag, then Jack, then suddenly Elon.

A leadership role within a company is mutable, which means that the direction of a company can change. When we put our trust in a verbal commitment of a company, perhaps drafted by a PR firm, we must remember that the role which drives that promise can be changed–and inevitably will be, as we don’t live forever.

Individuals are mutable, too. People age, change careers, lose interest, get sick, and ultimately die. It’s okay to be mutable.

Even when we commit to a contractual obligation, the meaning of the contract can still vary within the interpretation of the law. Legal experts can sometimes help us to better understand all of the possible outcomes and how likely they are.

When we add a trust assumption in a specific protocol or a theorem, we can be confident that the nature of that trust is not going to change. Our understanding of it might change–perhaps we discover an undesirable property that was encoded within it. No worries, we can stop using the old undesirable protocol and switch to a new one.

Imagine a terrible law that was written before we knew any better, that is ultimately challenged and abandoned. The old immutable law still says what it said before, but our legal system decides to stop using it. Being immutable is okay, too.

Explicit and Implicit

To trust something explicitly is to fully consent to how it can behave and how it can change. To trust a complex system with many components of varying mutability as a single opaque agent is to accept its complexity implicitly.

When a couple starts dating, they start out trusting that their relationship is operating within the default expectations of our society or their social group. Sometimes that’s as far as relationships get, they rely entirely on these implicit assumptions. Other relationships will slowly and explicitly map out important assumptions and boundaries: Are we exclusive? Have we been tested for STI’s recently? What’s our safe word? Are we always putting the toilet seat down?

Relationships start being based on implicit trust, but can become increasingly anchored by explicit trust.

When the CEO of a company makes a promise, they’re making a commitment on behalf of all of the participants of the organization: The employees, the board, the suppliers and contractors, sometimes even the shareholders. How many times has a company promised us that our data is safe, only to leak their data a few months later because an employee was careless?

When we choose to trust a company to behave in some way, we are implicitly consenting to the behaviour of all of the components within that system.

Some trust assumptions are simple and explicit (“I trust you to always put the toilet seat down”) and we can have clear expectations of what happens if that trust is violated (toilet seat stays up). Other trust assumptions are just the tip of a complex iceberg of assumptions (“I trust Apple to care about my privacy”) and it can be extremely hard to enumerate all of the possible failure modes and fully consent, so we can choose to trust them implicitly.

Let’s say that implicit trust assumptions are ones that contain an arrangement of additional trust assumptions behind it, with varying mutability and implicitness.

Trust Chains

The challenge with mutable and implicit trust points is that it’s impossible to chain them while maintaining strong confidence. The complexity of assumptions spirals astronomically with each additional chain. Sometimes the legal system can help us mitigate this by enforcing assumptions from the outside: If we have a contractual agreement with all participating parties, then anyone deviating from the expectations can be later sued and perhaps damages can be recovered (but even that is merely a mitigation, the original desired state cannot be guaranteed).

What if we had a bunch of mechanisms that had explicit and immutable trust properties? We could chain them to arbitrary arrangements, while still having full confidence of the outcome’s variability.

We can take several mathematical axioms, and use them to build complex mathematical theorems that maintain the same hard trust expectations we established from the axioms.

Deep & Complex Relationships

In a world with more explicit and immutable trust mechanisms, we can create more interesting and complicated trusted relationships within our society.

Trustless does not mean we must trust each other less, but rather it means that we can trust each other more!

Even in our intimate relationships, ample communication and setting explicit boundaries allows us to create stronger and more complex intimate relationships. Relationships that are entirely bootstrapped from the implicit assumptions of our society’s defaults are the ones that are limited within that same framework–to the point that we’ve had to build an institution of marriage to enforce it with the help of our legal system.

With more explicit and immutable trust mechanisms, we can create more complicated cooperative collectives, we can create more interesting governance structures, we can create a larger solution space for our future.

Let’s create a world with more better trust.