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title: "Blockchain as a confidence machine — The problem of trust & challenges of governance"
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date:
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link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101284

# Summary

# Extracts
"trust depends on personal vulnerability and risk-taking, whereas confidence depends on internalised expectations deriving from knowledge or past experiences."


”The arguments presented here focus on public and permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum rather than private or permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger and Amazon's QLDB—as the latter are not considered to be “trustless” due to the dominant role of one or more organizations in maintaining those ledgers”
- can we change this?

"According to Luhman [[34](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X20303067?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#bib34)]; the higher the complexity of a system, the longer it will take for concrete expectations to develop about the operations of that system."

Hume [[58](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X20303067?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#bib58)] suggests that governments and other complex institutional arrangements should not be trusted at the outset.

"Hardin [[59](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X20303067?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#bib59)] points out, one should instead focus on setting up the necessary checks and balances and transparency requirements that will enable the emergence of a more trustworthy system."

"According to Giddens [[25](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X20303067?dgcid=raven_sd_recommender_email#bib25)]: “There would be no need to trust anyone whose activities were continually visible and whose thought processes were transparent, or to trust any system whose workings were wholly known and understood” (p. 33)"

"confidence in a blockchain-based system may also be undermined by the actions of core developers who hold significant influence over exceptional (yet fundamental) decisions concerning changes in the blockchain protocol, as well as by the possible collusion of miners or mining-pools. Hence, despite the qualification as a trustless system, enabled by the building of confidence, the need for trust in a blockchain-based system is not eliminated."

## Highlights
- Blockchain technology is not a trustless technology but rather a confidence machine.
- Blockchain technology increase confidence in the operations of a computational system.
- Confidence in a blockchain system depends upon its underlying governance structure.
- The governance of a blockchain system requires trusting a distributed web of actors.
- Constitutional & polycentric governance theory can help improve blockchain governance.

# Notes
Since blockchain is without trust, what replaces trust as the fundamental aspect of its governance? 

There are at least four different types of actors that blockchian technology requires us to trust
- minings farms, mining pools, popular online exchanges and blockchain explorers
	- these have become centralized points of failure
- Core developes and open source contributors
	- They have the power to influence the evolution of the blockchain
- crypto and token holders (to a lesser extent) e.g., eth fork/bitcoin blocksize thing
- regulators
- 

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