One thing that I still donât understand about blockchain is the âtrustlessâ aspect of blockchains. Blockchains are not âtrustlessâ, rather it shifts the trust balance away from trusting people and corporations to trusting an algorithm.1
The blockchain really only stores a pointer to a good 99% of content that supposedly lives âon-chainâ, most of it is never 100% on chain. (This is also why people meme on NFT owners which just link to a PNG, itâs literally just a weak pointer. If the image hosting service goes down, that pointer is useless as it is immutable). The problem with this model is that if most of the value comes from the âoff-chainâ content, then what use is this proof of ownership if I canât do anything with it?
The only thing that actually connects the blockchain with the âoff-chainâ value is⊠you guessed it⊠trust.
Footnotes
-
Also, how do we go about trusting the algorithm that is âcryptographically secureâ when a good 99.5% of the users donât actually understand how blockchain and cryptography works? â©