Trust Cannot Be Removed, Only Moved

Active avoidance of echo chambers is an excellent way to learn from the clash of different ideas. Always be open and curious to learn and avoid the trap of stalled thinking.

I came across Hamish Campbell’s post while browsing around discussions of the #openweb. There’s something fitting about that context – an open network of ideas where disagreement is not a bug but a feature. That spirit matters here.

Campbell’s warning about trustless thinking creates the kind of useful tension that makes these discussions worthwhile. It raises a question: what kind of trust are we talking about?

Trust is Not One Thing

Ideally, we should have different words for each application of trust, but short of neologisms, we can clarify it by understanding it in three different layers.

First is interpersonal trust: the everyday social aspect of relationships, reputation, empathy, and shared norms. This is the kind of trust that allows collaboration without contracts, where people adapt to ambiguity, forgive mistakes, and coordinate through context rather than enforcement. It is flexible, human, and fragile in its own way – but also deeply resilient when communities are healthy.

Second is institutional trust, which often becomes coercive. This is trust placed in centralized systems – states, banks, large platforms, intermediaries – where participation isn’t always voluntary and exit is costly or impossible. Much of the cypherpunk critique begins here.

Declining trust in these institutions is not irrational; it is often a response to surveillance, capture, incompetence, or outright abuse of power. Over time, many of these systems have accumulated incentives to extract value rather than preserve legitimacy.

Third is systems trust: code, cryptographic protocols, and incentive structures. Once in place, the system can constrain what any individual participant is able to do. Here, trust does not mean belief in good intentions. It is adversarial by design.

“Don’t Trust, Verify.” does not mean “trust nobody.” It means that where verification is possible, blind trust should not be necessary.

In security terms, trust is vulnerability: if this component misbehaves, you are exposed. The goal of system design is to reduce that exposure.

The confusion in debates like this often comes from treating all three layers as if they were the same thing.

Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes

Institutions are abstract entities, sometimes with useful social functions, sometimes completely disconnected from reality. When states and corporations become intertwined, incentives shift toward preserving control, access, and influence.

Distortion of incentives also leads to incompetence, platform censorship, and subsidized spying, as with the infamous AT&T Room 641A – a telecommunications facility used for government mass surveillance.

Cypherpunk thinking – especially in the tradition of Nick Szabo – focuses heavily on the institutional layer. In Trusted Third Parties Are Security Holes Szabo’s point is clear: trusted intermediaries concentrate risk. They become surveillance points, coercion points, and failure points. The “security hole” is not trust itself, but enforced dependence on a party whose incentives may diverge from yours.

Szabo explains that trust is better understood as vulnerability. To trust a third party is to be vulnerable to that party.

Cypherpunks never argued that humans are inherently untrustworthy. They intended to relocate trust from broken or coercive sources to transparent systems, where agreements can be made more reliable. This is not an argument against human trust. It is an argument against forced trust in systems that cannot be held accountable by their users in real time.

System trust remains meaningful when the system is open to scrutiny and challenge – typically through open-source software. If it cannot be inspected, then you are trusting whoever controls the system.

Open source makes the assumptions underlying trust inspectable and contestable.

Without transparency, trust in “code” becomes indistinguishable from trust in a hidden intermediary. At that point, the security model has not changed; only the branding has.

Cryptography Relocates Trust

Trust cannot be eliminated, it can only be moved.

Cryptographic systems do not remove trust from the world; they relocate it. Instead of trusting institutions to behave correctly, you trust protocol rules, mathematics, transparent execution, and assumptions that can be independently verified.

This shift is often motivated by repeated institutional failure. Banks freeze accounts. Platforms censor arbitrarily. Governments expand surveillance. Trusted third parties fail structurally because their incentives drift away from those they claim to serve.

Breakdown of trust in states and banks during the 2008 financial crisis formed an important part of the context in which Bitcoin emerged. The Snowden revelations later made the risks of trusting centralized communications infrastructure much harder to ignore and accelerated interest in P2P and encrypted communication.

Reducing trust in certain institutions is not anti-social. It is protective.

This is where Campbell’s concern becomes important. A culture that treats all trust as risk can flatten social reality. Not everything should be reduced to adversarial logic. If every interaction becomes an optimization problem, something human is lost.

Toward Trustworthy Systems

Cypherpunk systems were never meant to replace interpersonal trust. They are meant to reduce situations where trust is exploited. The aim is not to eliminate relationships, but to remove unnecessary exposure to coercion.

Trustless systems often enable more cooperation among strangers, even at previously unthinkable scales – without prior relationships or institutional permission. Reducing the need for institutional trust expands the possibilities for cooperation.

The Silk Road marketplace became famous when state actors eventually moved to shut it down. It demonstrated strangers could coordinate voluntarily, exchange value, and establish reputations without asking for permission.

The relevant point is the architecture that made it possible. A centralized site associated with a decentralized and trustless system demonstrated how these technologies could compound the effects of good design.

Reducing dependency on trusted intermediaries can create forms of freedom that were previously assumed to be impossible.

Law and contracts already try to formalize trust. Cryptographic systems can make several agreements mechanically enforceable without relying on an intermediary.

No one can remove trust, only move it.

The real distinction is not between trust and trustlessness, but between voluntary trust and imposed trust. Between systems where trust can be chosen, adjusted, or withdrawn – and systems where it is structurally enforced.

Interpersonal trust builds the fabric of society. Systems trust protects the conditions under which that fabric can exist. Institutional trust is only valuable when it remains accountable and reversible.

Cypherpunks aren’t trying to create a trustless society where people lose connection. They are trying to create a world where trust is no longer extracted by default, where it can be placed deliberately among individuals, relationships, and communities – while making coercive and unnecessary institutional trust increasingly irrelevant.