This is not discussed enough and is very important. There are many ways in which technology is transforming society: when you think about the ‘uberization’ of the economy and about artificial intelligence (AI), bots online interacting with us in customer service situations; blockchain is a part of this broader shift towards technology.
It’s still too early to tell what all this means, but one area that is potentially really important and interesting is how technology impacts human trust. Swedes were polled and asked, “How much do you trust your fellow Swede?”, and well over 60% of Swedes generally trust their fellow Swede. The same question was posed to Brazilians, and the result was that less than 10% of Brazilians trust their fellow citizens. So there is a massive trust gap between some countries. How can we bridge that trust gap? How could you ever get Brazil up to where Sweden is? That’s not an easy problem to solve, but there would be significant benefits if people trusted each other more in terms of economic activity, relationships, paying taxes, and so on. One of the big challenges Greece is facing, for example, is that people don’t think other people are paying their taxes, so why should they? What if we could interrupt this state of mistrust?
Blockchain could potentially create systems where you obviate the need for some forms of trust. You won’t actually need to trust someone, because the rules of the blockchain system would bound you to a set of governing processes, where certain things were prevented from happening (e.g., fraud). So in essence, you could replace trust with software code; “in code we trust” so to speak. We replace the handshake with a digital handshake that can’t be broken, because the rules of the system are organised in this way and are tamper-resistant (although, importantly, they are not entirely tamper-proof).
Now, what would it mean for society if we didn’t need to trust each other as much? This question requires greater attention.
Garrick Hileman and Michel Rauchs released the 2017 Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study, which can be downloaded as a PDF here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3040224.
You can read the brief summary of their study here: https://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2017/central-banks-are-trialling-blockchain/
The above interview was conducted on 12 December, 2017.