Blockchains don’t actually eliminate trust. What they do is minimize the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system. They do this by distributing trust among different actors in the system via an economic game that incentivizes actors to cooperate with the rules defined by the protocol.

Of course, this assumes that we trust that a majority of the power held in the system belongs to stakeholders who share similar values. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can claim — at least, not yet — to have figured out exactly what those shared values consist of. Hence the proliferation of blockchains and contentious forks in the past year …