[Cryptography] Trustworthiness

[Nolan Shah]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 4:26 AM, mok-kong shen <mok-kong.shen at t-online.de>
wrote:

> P. G. Neumann wrote in his article: Trustworthiness and Trustfulness are
> Essential,
> CACM, vol.60, p.28:
>
> "The concept of trustworthiness seems to becoming supplanted with people
> falsely
> placing their trust in systems and people that are simply not trustworthy
> -- without
> any  strong cases being made for safety, security, or indeed assurance
> that might
> otherwise be found in regulated critical industries such as aviation.
> However, the
> risks of would-be "facts" may be the untimate danger."
>
> Are there any practical remedies in sight?
>
> M. K. Shen
>

Blockchains can be thought of as a way of building trust in trustless
systems w.r.t. cooperation (in particular, the consensus algorithm). But it
really depends on the situation and whether you consider a consensus to be
trustworthy.

That said, I don't consider blockchains practical for a lot of scenarios
(yet). Obviously for e-cash, there is Bitcoin and for e-contracts, there is
Ethereum. But for more concrete and complex use cases (e.g., shared
economy, IoT) it will take some more research/innovation to build good
decentralized systems.

Nolan Shah
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