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https://medium.com/@profgalloway/the-failed-promise-of-trustlessness-85d591c79b41>
"It’s been a bummer summer for crypto. Flagship coins Bitcoin and Ether are at
multiyear lows, while lesser coins barrel to zero. Luna went from a market
capitalization of $34 billion (“market” and “capitalization” are becoming
misnomers for crypto) to worthless in a matter of days.
Last week, crypto lending platform Celsius announced it was pausing all
withdrawals and transfers between accounts. The company that told us to “unbank
yourself” because “banking is broken” broke. (Pro tip: CEOs shitposting with
their T-shirts are likely not great fiduciaries.)
This is the end of the beginning of web3, not the beginning of the end. A
staggering amount of human and financial capital has been allocated to web3
businesses and technologies. If we invested this much in cheese we’d convince
ourselves that Gouda can arrest a pandemic. But the sector’s struggles
highlight crypto’s failure to deliver on a core promise: trustlessness.
Trustless transactions are crypto’s raison d’etre. In the crypto Magna Carta,
the white paper that introduced Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakomoto used the word “trust”
thirteen times (in eight pages) and summed up cryptocurrency as “a system for
electronic transactions without relying on trust.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
