The problem for the blockchain and by extension NFTs is that the transactions are only trustless for the things that can be known about by the chain. Which is a vanishingly small amount of information, basically the exchange of tokens. There is no way to link a token to something in the real world without bringing in trust of a third party. At which point you’re just replicating what we already have with more complexity and less protection.
You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!
I don't think we need things to be trustless. Most economic activity relies on trust of some sort. We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent. The actual data that the algorithm knows about can be pretty small, just a string:
> There was a pothole in the road at such-and-such time and place, and now there's not. Validated by users X, Y, Z
Just little promises, and don't value the token if your don't trust the validator.
The only kind of trust that's a problem here is custodial trust. A platform can never be more trustworthy than its least trustworthy admin.
And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same.
Centralized institutions become less trustworthy over time, so whatever work I put in to curry favor with whatever authority might reward me will be lost when that authority falls to corruption.
> And yes, I know that I don't need a blockchain to do good things, but I do need a blockchain to retire on having done good things. And more importantly, to live in a world that's full of people doing the same.
I don't think a case has been made for that yet. For example:
> We can implement webs of trust on chain and incentivize trusted individuals to validate whatever relationships between the chain and the real world that the NFT's represent.
This sounds amazing! Except it falls into a recursive problem. You need to trust the knowledge about the real world so you validate it but you also need to trust the validators so you need to validate them somehow and that reoccurs. You could argue that there is a social proof in terms of users vouching for one another a 'web of trust' but those are easily gamed. You exchange explicit centralization for implicit centralization so not only have the issues of a centralized institution anyway but all the extant issues we see in crypto land in terms of fraud and so on. It's also veering into dystopian territory in terms of keeping an immutable reputation score about people which is deeply disturbing.
Are they easily gamed? I give my friends the code to my garage, nobody has gamed the web of trust and made off with my tools yet. If we want tight knit communities that we can trust, then we have to practice it. If we want do have the same benefits that you get from a trusted group of friends, but with thousands or millions of users, we'll need algorithmic help scaling it.
Re: reputation, I agree that some kind of trustworthiness score is a dystopian outcome, provided that it's a single number that the network has universal consensus on. But I think it's a lot less onerous if the score is calculated via graph traversal.
Don't ask "how trustworthy is user A," instead ask, "given users A and B, who does A trust that trusts B (and what kinds of trust have they configured)?" I'm not angling for a credit score, I'm angling to replace implicitly trusted institutions (like banks) with explicitly trusted third parties (like mutual friends, or people that users A and B both recognize as an expert).
Yes, like a Ponzi scheme or MLM for example. That's literally a web of trust setup to defraud people and one that often relies on pre-existing trusted relationships to spread. Almost all crimes involving social engineering like fraud are going to involve exploiting webs of trust. And whilst your friends may never steal your tools other people do end up being robbed by their friends.
> Don't ask "how trustworthy is user A," instead ask, "given users A and B, who does A trust that trusts B (and what kinds of trust have they configured)?" I'm not angling for a credit score, I'm angling to replace implicitly trusted institutions (like banks) with explicitly trusted third parties (like mutual friends, or people that users A and B both recognize as an expert).
Right and people won't create fake webs of trust with this to engage in scamming like they do in the real world already? No one would try to ruin your reputation this way and so forth. It feels like proponents of these social credit schemes do literally zero adversarial thinking. Similar to the way no one seemed to have thought about the rampant bot fraud now occurring on NFT marketplaces which are probably a scheme to setup false identities more than offload low value NFTs. But theft, fraud and automating it seem to not have occurred to the designers.
> No one would try to ruin your reputation this way and so forth
The problems that you're describing only come up if there's a centralized oracle for a globally consistent reputation score. But the only angle where we need global consistency is re: who has what token. Reputation can be ad-hoc and only locally consistent. And since you're trading goods for NFT's you're probably co-located with all of the right people anyway. After all, an NFT for filling a pothole is worth more to the people who had to deal with that pothole than it is to people far away.
If somebody is out to ruin your reputation, then they're unlikely to be involved in the transitive trust pathways that are used to validate tokens, so unless you're trying to do business with them I'm not sure why it would matter.
Yeah, there's always the possibility that somebody you trust has decided to trust a bad actor, but someone's going to know about the deception because the alleged impact is nowhere to be found, so get together as a community and figure out who the liar is and revoke their trust.
Right but you’re just inventing local government with extra steps now. Lots of local governments have more direct democracy and I’m all for organising that in a caring manner. It just seems super pointless to involve blockchains, NFTs and technologically verified trust chains where you have to manage interpersonal relationships on chain as well as IRL.
Local governments, in my limited experience and study of history, tend to corrupt easily to the whims of nonlocal wealthy people. Just look at the US's exploits in South America since the 70's (or a recent election in my home town).
If you're going to reject the demands of foreign money, local money has to be different in some way that makes it hard for outsiders to get without demonstrating some level of givashit about the locals. It can't just be a matter of exchange rates.
So yeah, it's overkill for most things, but the things it's justified for are really important.
Nothing about what you’re suggesting now needs a blockchain and having local money doesn’t prevent outside influence just changes how it is spent. People will just spend it on those that hold local money or have influence over those that do. You’re trying to passively solve a complex, hierarchical social problem with technology when we know that’s bound to fail or at best paper over the cracks.
And yeah there are lots of places that local government sucks but there are also lots of places where it doesn’t and I guarantee you the reason isn’t tech.
I think that when you replace a hierarchy with an arbitrary directed graph, you can be pretty confident that what you've done will at least be impactful re: problems that hierarchies have (namely corruption at the top).
Whether they can scratch the itch in peer-to-peer mode is an unanswered question, but I think we'll get to find out.
Trusting somebody with admin access to the platform is quite different than peers using the platform to scale the to benefits from trusting each other.
Blockchain is too specific, but you're going to need some kind of consensus tech to achieve the latter without the former.
You can already donate to people doing good things across a whole spectrum of options and see tangible side effects. You don’t have to wait for NFTs to maybe grow infrastructure to allow this! You can literally build bridges, schools and all sorts of infrastructure for people around the globe right now!