Thread by @patio11

It was once observed to me that there are some communities where people who know each other only as avatars would quote take a bullet for endquote each other, and while that is probably a level one does not need to model for an API response, allowing high-trust spaces is powerful

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1404447251892637704

In some ways the future is here but not evenly distributed; you can model, for example, companies as being notably high mutual trust islands in a sea of (presumably!) lower mutual trust relationships.

Which implies something about e.g. their Slack channels.

And on that spectrum / within that dimensional space there are likely forms of trust which exist but which we can’t conveniently see or reason about right now, and who knows, perhaps forms of trust that do not yet exist but should.

Trust is deeply fundamental to the functioning of payments, incidentally. Credit cards are an almost worldwide trust network with a lot of peer edges with imperfect mutual trust by which one can construct surprisingly rich sets of good-enough-for-a-transaction trusted pathways.

Of course you'd expect me to wax eloquent about this given my job, but my mind was actually blown by it in about 2004, when I was flying through Detroit for the first time and stopped by a sandwich shop.

How would you explain that transaction to a space alien? Something like:

This sandwich maker does not know this man. He has never seen him before and will never again. But he will give him a sandwich anyhow for a promise of eventual payment. The promise is silently implied by handing over a plastic ritual artifact.

The exact specifics of the plastic ritual artifact are unimportant; humans have spend so many decades with them that they know small plastic rectangles mean money. The human consults his local oracle via waving the ritual artifact over it.

The oracle does not, of course, know the man. The oracle knows only one particular financial institution. It happens to have a branch in Detroit.

That financial institution has a relationship with another financial institution. This one is in San Francisco.

This web keeps going

Eventually, you arrive across an ocean in a small town called Ogaki. There sits a priest of money, who has entrusted the man with the ritual object, extracting from him a most solemn promise that to wave the ritual object is to promise to return to the priest with money later.

The sandwich maker will never meet this priest. He speaks no language in common with him; they can't even agree on what money itself means. But they both know the fundamental rule of human trade: wave plastic, get sandwich.

And stepping back from the allegory (though that is a very real transaction and the sandwich was delicious), thus credit card networks have manufactured little bubbles of relatively high trust in space/time across the network of humanity and from this froth does much good come.