Trust is essential in any relationship. As trust deteriorates, parties of a relationship get thrown into anxiety, suspicion, and a whole host of other behaviours that stem from their feelings of insecurity in the arrangement. This is true whether it be a romantic relationship or the social contract that concerns the people of a country and their relationship with the various bodies set up to act in their best interest.

If trust is lost in a romantic relationship, although often difficult, one can extricate themselves from the toxic arrangement with a much greater degree of ease than extricating themselves from the social contract with the powers that be when trust is lost there.

Fake news stretches the already fragile social contract

Just as in romantic relationships, where many will simply accept whatever their partner says despite their friends and family pointing out concerning behaviour, there are the same people in society that will never question the benevolence of the authorities and institutions.

On the other hand, the numbers of people dissatisfied with the dynamics of the social contract seems to be increasing rapidly. Society is filled with groups of substantial numbers that have lost trust in the numerous apparatuses set up to regulate corporations, ensure justice is delivered for crimes against the people and planet and who set the agenda for where we are going collectively.

That’s not to say that there is necessarily any kind of unity between those dissatisfied with the status quo, wherein many of these groups who speak up on some of these issues are equally as distrustful of those who are disaffected on another front.

Often those concerned with environmental vandalism and the government’s neglect of meaningful action hold negative opinions of Bitcoin for its energy consumption, while many Bitcoin ‘libertarians’ who hold no trust for government, fiat and central banks were aligned against ‘antivaxxers’ for their protesting of government overreach during the last few years.

The situation has become one giant mess. Fake news is circulated around the world in a matter of minutes, deepfakes mean seeing is no longer believing, half of a country’s populations can have zero confidence in the electoral processes following questionable victories and as big tech censorship increases, it renders any chance of achieving meaningful change through legacy instruments as being extremely unlikely to succeed.

‘Don’t trust, verify’

Many may have heard the mantra ‘don’t trust, verify, but where exactly is one supposed to verify.

Sure we can evaluate the output from a digital signature algorithm to determine whether it satisfies the conditions for transferring tokens in the Bitcoin system, in turn eliminating some of the need for trusted third parties, but many other things in life cannot be evaluated under such clear cut algorithms.

If claims are made about Google’s overreach, are you expected to verify that through a Google search? If claims are made about the integrity of the mainstream media are you to verify these claims through the mainstream media?

As the distrust in society grows we see more and more expressions of the insecurity people feel in their relationship with the powers that be.

Much of the fake news and viral memetics that circulate the Internet these days would have been unable to find themselves retransmitted were it not for a critical mass of the population having somewhat sympathetic resonance themselves. Such ideas cannot propagate without a medium or a culture that supports it.

Whether or not the distrust is valid is one side of the coin that must be discussed, but with the way things are going it seems highly unlikely that the necessary levels of trust can be restored under the tooling of the legacy paradigm.

Impeccable record keeping brings trust

What are needed are systems and tools that allow us to rebuild that trust or build trust anew. Trust is necessary to eliminate the inefficiencies around constant micromanagement, around constant supervision, around being able to leverage your past performance to increase confidence in your future performance.

In that respect, something that would be a massive boon for building trust would be a system which allows for impeccable record keeping.

Enter Bitcoin.

Triple entry accounting via blockchain

Blockchain facilitated triple entry account keeping is the biggest thing to happen to record keeping since its predecessor double entry bookkeeping was created by Florentine merchants at the end of the C13th.

Triple entry accounting means more than just keeping track of money, but rather it exposes those records for public scrutiny. Since those records are then exposed for public scrutiny and they can be guaranteed to be immutable, operations and functions can be performed against those records by anyone.

That’s not to say the specific details and context of every entry on the ledger are exposed for all to see, but rather that there is a log that will exist in perpetuity.

With institutions that are primarily set up as a representation of ‘We The People’ and whose entire bankroll is derived from the earnings of taxpayers, having an immutable record of how that taxation revenue is spent, which parties authorised expenditure and according to what rationale or evidence such policy was developed could be monumental in restoring the trust in the social contract.