Trust is vital to the sustained existence of money. No currency can prevail without it. However, following the international crisis of 2008, the liability-side of trust became increasingly apparent. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies challenged the need to trust and proposed an alternative “trustless” system. In the context of rising interest and concern about cryptocurrencies, the authors intend to discuss the role of trust in the evolution of money, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern sovereign fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, and whether cryptocurrencies are prompting a shift in the paradigm of money or not.
TopThe Nature Of Trust
Trust is vital in human relationships and interactions. It is part of human nature to be able to trust and being trusted. It seems evident that trust is the cornerstone of society and its survival but understanding what it involves seems difficult to achieve. Everyone can distinguish people they trust. However, if several individuals were asked to define trust with certainty, a consensual definition would not be obtained. Still, one would probably get several common key aspects of such a complex concept.
The concept of trust has been studied in such disciplines as psychology, philosophy, sociology, business or political science, and conceptualised according to different theories, frameworks and approaches. Some authors have studied its development since early childhood (Erikson, 1982), in the organizational environment and performance (Bencsik, Jakubik, & Juhasz, 2020), others have studied trust in customer-salesmen interaction (Mangus, Jones, Folse, & Sridhar, 2020), healthcare context (Peters & Bilton, 2018), and many other areas of human interaction. Because of the extent of the concept, it is nearly impossible to find a consensual definition of it, even in the field of science.
Trust seems to have a brain processing dimension, in which a semantic pointer is nurtured by bindings of the self, the person trusted, the situation and emotion, which in turn bounds to other bindings representing information. Trust and mistrust emerge from the result of processing this entire network of interconnections (Thagard, 2019). However, to reach a more holistic understanding of the concept it is crucial to examine it from other perspectives.