Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wyager 1775 days ago
Oh great, then how about you implicitly trust me with your bank login info and email it to me?

> you couldn't get surgery, ride on a plane, get food from a grocery store,

I look up my doctors' ratings before I use them. I don't fly sketchy third-world airlines with bad safety records. I don't buy food from grocery stores in places with bad food safety. "Trusted" and "trustless" are shorthand for the degree of system-external due diligence you need to do before having a sufficient degree of confidence.

3 comments

This is silly. When looking at the ratings for your doctor, do you look up the rating of the raters?

The point isn't that you have to trust everything. The point is that trust underpins everything. At some level, you are trusting something.

> do you look up the rating of the raters?

Obviously. Most rating sites are scams. There might not be a formal meta-rather, but I can use eg reddit.

In that, you are still trusting that the system you have devised had not been successfully gamed or hacked by an adversary. For that matter, you may just be trusting that you don't have an adversary.

The rabbit hole runs stupid deep.

You've just effectively demonstrated how trust functions in society, not its absence.
But you're trusting the ratings and the safety records.