[mikelockz]

His statements about trust in "institutions" misses the mark for me. Deutsche Bank has been convicted and fined repeatedly for money laundering. They have neither reformed their operations not been penalized enough to impact their business. Same for all the other large financial institutions that caused the 2008 collapse. No figureheads or executives were punished financially or criminally. Another example would be the Equifax hack that stole the private data of 143 million Americans and again no civil or criminal penalties for the people responsible.

These companies are too big to fail and don't respond to market forces. They have captured the government regulators and create barriers to entry for competitors.

For many people there is no "institutional" trust as Schneier describes. There is forced institutional interaction, mostly likely because it benefits the government to monitor individuals. Perhaps cryptocurrencies are a fad, but I doubt his conclusion that there is no utility value in a "trustless" system. The current system is broken and nobody is fixing it.