The attraction of trust

People trust people.

People trust organisations or businesses because they trust the people within them. Furthermore, people trust products, technologies, information, etc. because they trust the people behind these products, technologies, information, etc.

For example:

• Skydivers don’t trust their parachute, they trust the engineers who designed the parachute and the staff at the inspection body who certified the parachute to have done their job properly.
  Nobody would use a free parachute given to them by a stranger (unless they were suicidal). They would at the very least bring it to an inspection facility where professionals could examine the equipment’s safety before utilising it.

• People do not trust a medicine (for example, an aspirin tablet), but rather their doctor who prescribed it, the expertise of scientists in pharmaceutical corporations, and the personnel who conducted studies on the safety and efficacy of such medicine.

  Nobody would accept a pill found in a public setting, even if they had a severe headache and the pill resembled an aspirin tablet.

So in order to build trust into a system, we must attract as many trustworthy people as possible. And these trustworthy individuals should come from a variety of backgrounds. People of various nationalities, wealth, interests, ages, genders, political beliefs, ethnicities, races, intellects, faiths, lifestyles, and so on. And the well-being of their fellow humans should be of the utmost importance to these trustworthy individuals. People who are only focused on their own advantage or the gains of other influential groups of people, regardless of the ramifications for the majority of users, are not trustworthy at all. Rather, trustworthy operators are characterised by selflessness. We know that there are many benevolent and virtuous people out there who are not willing to destroy their reputation just for a short-term gain.

So how can we attract trust into a system and ban non-trustworthy behaviour from it?

By using the same principles that are used to educate children or pets, or how governments motivate their citizens to act in a civilised manner: Reward and punishment.

We can attract trust into a system by rewarding trustworthy behaviour and by punishing untrustworthy behaviour.

But, in order to know what we want to reward and what we want to punish, we must first agree on what trustworthy behaviour is. As humans, we rate other people’s trustworthiness on the following characteristics (or at least a subset of them):

• honest & truthful: telling the truth; free from fraud or deception; marked by free, forthright, and sincere expression
• sincere & genuine: free of hypocrisy, pretence and dissimulation (actually having the reputed or apparent qualities or character)
• reliable: suitable or fit to be relied on
• benevolent: marked by or disposed to doing good
• fair: marked by impartiality - free from self-interest, prejudice or favouritism
• transparent & open: free from reserve or deceit
• upright: marked by strong moral rectitude
• faithful: firm in adherence to promises or in observance of duty
• peaceable: not contentious, quarrelsome or hostile but inclined to avoid conflict, strife and dissension
• respectful: marked by or showing respect or deference

A person who exhibits these characteristics is usually referred to as ‘a person of integrity’. Of course, not all of these character traits can be objectively assessed, but it is sufficient if the system is configured in such a way that desirable behaviour is rewarded and undesirable behaviour is promptly punished.

A financial incentive is unquestionably the best way to reward desired behaviour as it is easily quantifiable and very appealing in today’s society.

In comparison to a monetary reward for desirable behaviour, we should avoid a monetary penalty for undesirable behaviour, because an investment in hardware and electricity (in the case of Proof of Work) or a monetary deposit (in the case of Proof of Stake) would entail all of the disadvantages of Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.

In a trust-based system, however, we have something much more valuable from the operators than financial liabilities: their reputation.