Many of us learn knowledge related to Bitcoin on bitcointalk to achieve cognitive growth. In my opinion, ideas behind Bitcoin are more important than the technical architecture of it because it is thought that guides actions. Trust is a respectable characteristic of Bitcoin, which has reached the highest level of trust. Why?
First we need to understand why we need trust in our daily lives, then why Bitcoin has the highest state in trust---trust-free.In real life, as a member of human society, we are engaged in various economic activities every day. We get paid through work, and then use income to purchase various materials for basic needs. The reason why diversified economic activities of mankind can be executed normally is because there is a set of basic order followed by us.
But this order is often controlled centrally, leaving a space for power rent-seeking, which has courted injustice to a large extent.In the current world built by centralized system, the authenticity and validity of wealth transferring is protected by a third party as an intermediary. Who is a completely credible middleman? That role is mostly played by banks and all sorts of payment agencies, credit card companies, etc. We trust them and their services ensure the normal conduct of economic behavior.
However, once one of the banks goes bankrupt, all of our assets there may disappear.
- In banks' ledger server, our money is just a string of number. Banks render these number effective. We trust banks then we carry out normal economic activities. But thought banks will not directly tamper with the number in our account, the government can depreciate the value of our wealth by issuing paper money in a large amount to deprive our money.
- When it comes to Bitcoin, no intermediary is needed in money transferring. A distributed system built trust with the help of decentralization. Bitcoin protocol allows two separate individuals to conduct transactions in a peer-to-peer manner via the Internet. When you transfer Bitcoin from one account to another, you can trust not only its underlying system for support, but also the authenticity of the sender and the validity of Bitcoin.
In the distributed network of Bitcoin, intermediaries are replaced by
public key cryptosystem and
consensus mechanisms to ensure the authenticity and validity of transfers. This is why we say that Bitcoin solved the trust problem in transactions and accomplished intermediary-free and the highest level of trust---trust-free.
How do you understand Bitcoin's solution to trust? I'd like to know your ideas.