"... Like the internet the blockchain is mistakenly viewed as the final answer to the problem of "intermediation” — the problem of inefficient, unwanted or unreliable go-betweens. The trouble with this view, he notes, is that intermediaries, when trustworthy, play many beneficial roles: pairing buyers with sellers, bundling demand to create economies of scale, correcting imbalances in bargaining power. Because there is no widespread desire to eliminate intermediaries, he predicts that blockchain technology will most often “supplement or complement conventional legal regimes, not replace them,” proving most useful when rigidity and automation are valuable.

However, Werbach argues, the most significant innovation of blockchain is not governmental or even technological but emotional: the creation of “a new form of trust,” in which you put your confidence in a store of information without relying on any single person to authenticate it — trust the system, not its parts. The outstanding question is whether this method of cultivating trust is viable, and if it is, in what ways we can best deploy it. The answers we come up with are likely to determine blockchain’s future. "

NY Times book review of "The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust" (MIT, Kevin Werbach) (2019-02-15)

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