A few days ago, my CEO texted me, “If you can create a link between Stephen M. R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust and blockchain, you’ll be golden.” I immediately bought the book on Amazon and started reading a few days later. I understood my CEO’s point in a matter of pages:
Blockchain is solving the problem of global distrust.
Covey’s inherent idea is that trust in any context (personal, relational, organizational, “marketal,” and societal) raises speed and lowers cost. The converse is true due to a lack of trust: slower transactional speed and higher costs. At first glance this may seem obvious, but applying these ideas to blockchain is essential if it is going to become a universal commodity.
First, blockchain has to build a self trust. It must be able to get to the point where it can rely on itself — programmers don’t need to hedge their bets when they advocate for their product, because they know it’s going to accomplish its given purpose.
Second, blockchain has to build relational trust. Users need to know that they can trust the system to trade currency, commodities, and services, without error or fear of corruption and scandal.
Third, the blockchain has to build organizational trust. That is to say, blockchain needs to get to the point where organizations can implement it into their daily operations, and use it to transact between other organizations seamlessly.
Fourth, blockchain needs to gain market trust. There needs to come a time when the objection, “…but volatility…” is no longer a concern. That will only lead to the fifth element: societal trust. Once these things have been accomplished, blockchain will be something that is used just as frequently as the internet.
Once people understand that blockchain allows them to completely trust anyone, they will cease to be skeptical of it. Global adoption will be inevitable.
Stephen M. R. Covey is 100% correct when he says that the number one inhibitor of good business is a lack of trust. I’d like to think that he’d be a major proponent of blockchain, because its goal is to provide trust to any trustless environment.
Blockchain has some major hurdles to jump to be trusted to provide trust. Perhaps the first step should be humanization. If you could see the face of the person you need to transact with, and know that, because of blockchain, they are 100% trustworthy, why wouldn’t you want to use the system?
Blockchain may increase the speed of trust more than ever before. But to get there, it’s going to need to prove to people that it itself is trustworthy.
