[littlestymaar]

Ultimately, guaranteeing common trust between citizens is a fundamental role of the State.

For a mix of ideological reasons and lack of genuine interest for the internet from the legislators, mainly due to the generational factor I'd guess, it hasn't happened yet, but I expect government issued equivalent of IDs and passports for the internet to become mainstream sooner than later.

[eadmund]

> Ultimately, guaranteeing common trust between citizens is a fundamental role of the State.

I don’t think that really follows. Businesses credit bureaus and Dun & Bradstreet have been privately enabling trust between non-familiar parties for quite a long time. Various networks of merchants did the same in the Middle Ages.

[littlestymaar]

> Businesses credit bureaus and Dun & Bradstreet have been privately enabling trust between non-familiar parties for quite a long time.

Under the supervision of the State (they are regulated and rely on the justice and police system to make things work).

> Various networks of merchants did the same in the Middle Ages.

They did, and because there was no State the amount of trust they could built was fairly limited compared to was has later been made possible by the development of modern states (the industrial revolution appearing in the UK has partly been attributed to the institutional framework that existed there early).

Private actors can, and do, and have always done, build their own makeshift trust network, but building a society-wide trust network is a key pillar of what makes modern states “States” (and it directly derives from the “monopoly of violence”).

[lormayna]

Havala (https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala) or other similar way to transfer money abroad are working over a net of trust, but without any state trust system.

[littlestymaar]

Compare its use to SWIFT and you'll see the difference.

[nostrademons]

That’s not really what research on state formation has found. The basic definition of a state is “a centralized government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force”, and as you might expect from the definition, groups generally attain statehood by monopolizing the use of force. In other words, they are the bandits that become big enough that nobody dares oppose them. They attain statehood through what’s effectively a peace treaty, when all possible opposition basically says “okay, we’re submit to your jurisdiction, please stop killing us”. Very often, it actually is a literal peace treaty.

States will often co-opt existing trust networks as a way to enhance and maintain their legitimacy, as with Constantine’s adoption of Christianity to preserve social cohesion in the Roman Empire, or all the compromises that led the 13 original colonies to ratify the U.S. constitution in the wake of the American Revolution. But violence comes first, then statehood, then trust.

Attempts to legislate trust don’t really work. Trust is an emotion, it operates person-to-person, and saying “oh, you need to trust such-and-such” don’t really work unless you are trusted yourself.

[littlestymaar]

> The basic definition of a state is “a centralized government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force

I'm not saying otherwise (I've even referred to this in a later comment).

> But violence comes first, then statehood, then trust.

Nobody said anything about the historical process so you're not contradicting anyone.

> Attempts to legislate trust don’t really work

Quite the opposite, it works very, very well. Civil laws and jurisdiction on contracts have existed since the Roman Republic, and every society has some equivalent (you should read about how the Taliban could get back to power so quickly in big part because they kept doing civil justice in the rural afghan society even while the country was occupied by the US coalition).

You must have institutions to be sure than the other party is going to respect the contract, so that you don't have to trust them, you just need to trust that the state is going to enforce that contract (what they can do because they have the monopoly of violence and can just force the party violating the contract into submission).

With the monopoly of violence comes the responsibility to use your violence to enforce contracts, otherwise social structures are going to collapse (and someone else is going to take that job from you, and gone is your monopoly of violence)

[icoder]

Interestingly, as I've begun to realise the ease by which a State's trust can sway has actually increased my believe that this should come from 'below'. I think a trust network between people (of different countries) can be much more resilient.