[ambicapter]

> yeah trust and crypto don't go together ideologically, that's a purity problem crypto needs to get over itself

The first white papers I read about crypto emphasized the "trustless" part of it. It's a selling point. They exchanged human trust for computational trust, only now people are realizing the limits of computer trust (namely, anything that isn't digital isn't covered).

What we're looking for now is a way to actually entangle digital assets with physical assets (hence the rise of NFTs, which purport to be a physical thing, or at least the closest thing to).

[PKop]

You would always need a central authority to reconcile the state of the physical world with the digital ledger. At that point what is the blockchain for? Or, what does the network look like that "runs" the blockchain? Surely there isn't any mining or proof of work, because there's no internal token to produce this way; the value is all external.

And you cant trust random people to create the token or to reconcile (lie) about the physical/digital correspondence. Entangling digital with physical seems to devolve to just a database with a trusted authority administering it. I don't see any other way.

[swalsh]

My design philosophy is to use the blockchain for the parts where it's a good solution, and to not use it for the parts where it's not. For physical products that means adding some trust into the system. For pure digital systems, that means identity, money, or owned objects etc. can go on-chain. Things that are just transient data can go in a traditional database.

[swalsh]

> (namely, anything that isn't digital isn't covered)

Yep! this was my realization when I first started thinking about the idea. You can't computationally trust the movement of physical stuff. Some amount of trust is going to slip in somewhere. It's better to insert the trustless transactions in the places where the relationship is purely digital. In my example above, you have a large vendor which you (as a retailer) trust has inventory to back up every NFT they minted, and you trust to ship relatively reliably. You can't avoid that trust (though you could build mechanisms to increase your trust like 3rd party audits or something). But the relationship with hundreds of small retailers could be built trustlessly. So it's more like strategic trust as opposed to pure trustlessness.