2. Social trust

The sources listed below all indicate that there are two distinct types of social trust:

• Social trust: its concepts, determinants, roles, and raising ways
• The Impact of Trust on the Quality of Participation in Development
• Impact of Institutional Trust on Subjective Well-being in Selected Asian Countries
• Influence of Interpersonal and Institutional Trust on the Participation Willingness of Farmers in E-Commerce Poverty Alleviation
• The Relation between Interpersonal and Institutional Trust in European Countries: Which Came First?
• OECD Guidelines on Measuring Trust

The above publications all differentiate between interpersonal and institutional trust.

In the first chapter of his book titled Social Trust and Economic Development, O. Yul Kwon defines the two subtypes of trust as follows:

1. Interpersonal Trust
   Individuals’ expectations of other members of society to act and behave in a way that is beneficial to these individuals or at least not detrimental to them. Interpersonal trust reflects people’s subjective perspective of others’ reliability without legal commitment, and involves a degree of risk and uncertainty. Hence, trust involves two components: expectations and willingness to take risky actions based on the expectations.

2. Institutional Trust
   Institutional trust is the confidence of citizens in institutions. Citizens expect institutions to perform efficiently, effectively, fairly, and ethically in accordance with the roles assigned to them by law or with social norms in the eyes of citizens. People’s trust in institutions is not the same kind of trust as that between each other as individuals. Interpersonal trust is based on immediate, first-hand experience of other individuals, whereas institutional trust is more generally learned indirectly and at a distance, usually through the media and social intercourse. Interpersonal trust is an expression of the basic features of trusting personalities, whereas institutional trust is based on an evaluation of the performance of institutional functions.

Despite the fact that we were unable to locate any text in which Satoshi distinguishes between interpersonal and institutional trust, the impression given is that he had no problem with interpersonal trust, but only with institutional trust.

Since it is impossible to eliminate trust from a digital money system, we can conclude that every digital money system always falls into one of these two categories of trust. Banks and other traditional financial institutions clearly belong to the institutional trust category, whereas DLT systems, which can be operated by ordinary people make use of interpersonal trust.