Crypto was started to address a collapse of trust. Can it be trusted?
Cryptocurrency emerged from the ashes of the 2007-2009 financial crisis to solve a problem of trust. Not to renew faith in a collapsed banking system or to reverse decades of plummeting trust in government and other institutions.
It promised an end to the need for trust at all.
No longer would regular people have to rely on banks or intermediaries in order to spend their money online. Cryptocurrency offered a new system based on “cryptographic proof instead of trust,” as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, announced in a presenting the concept. Rather than trusting fallible human institutions, private citizens could put their faith in mathematical code
