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Without Trust


Some institutions and inventions are great precisely because they make trust irrelevant.

Charlie Brown keeps trying to kick the football. Lucy keeps pulling it away. Yet Charlie still has to trust her: he doesn't know how to kick a football without someone holding it, and it seems no candidate for holder presents him/herself except Lucy. 

But isn't there an obvious solution? There are small plastic kickoff kicking tees. As above. They sell for about $5 each. Doesn't Charlie get enough of an allowance to buy one? 

Cryptocurrencies exist because no one trusts central banks any longer. 

"Distributed ledgers:exist and find applications beyond the cryptos because people distrust a lot of other institutions. 

Covid-19 creates a difficult problem because people mistrust regulatory agencies, the medical profession, the big Pharma companies, etc. The problem may be to work through the distrust, not against it. Use cryptos and the like. Cryptos can handle supply chains for ventilators or vaccine doses, in such a way that a chain of possession can be viewed by anyone anywhere with perfect confidence. They can encode research data from vaccine trials, again eliminating the need for trust.... 



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