I think it's clear the US has been a high trust society. But, is this no longer the case?
How did we get here?
How does bitcoin help? Does it fix this or like many tools does it just help us live better?
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72 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebpoet 1h
aw man, a question I ask myself a lot
Bitcoin helps to act as a filter, among others. If I am speaking to someone who has thought a lot about the future, about privacy, about what wealth means, I know I can come to trust them. If I can sense that their mind has come up against the cultural program, faced the resistance or dissonance within it, and made a decision on their own for what their life will look like - I can trust.
and this seems to be replicated enough times to have an impact on the (still rather small) culture around it
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118 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 3h
We aren't there yet. In most of the country you can walk around without much concern and you can shop safely with merchants you don't know. In many places, people still leave their doors unlocked without concern.
The problem is that trust is extremely asymmetric. It takes generations to develop a high-trust society and that can unravel fast. However much trust has been lost, we won't be getting it back anytime soon.
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52 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 3h
Bitcoin reduces the need for trust with lower cost than the middleman bankers, network chargeback schemes and combined fee structures can realize.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford OP 32m
Indeed. I would argue not needing trust is better in both situations. There are always scammers and evil. No matter how trusting a culture actually is.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 14m
Yes. The only problem with Bitcoin is that it don't give a fuck (actually a feature) so you cannot Karen to the manager to get your money back and if you don't write to the NYT to do the reputation loss thing.
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75 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 1h
Rate of net migration is downstream of broken money, both home and abroad, that's why it's a top political issue and natsec is refocusing hemispherially so that we have stable neighbors...
A country is the people that live in it, and high trust countries have homogeneous base layers.
Security is arguably the one thing the state should do, so unfettered net migration is a sign of abdication, eroding trust further, resources then become strained by inefficient growth, eroding trust further... it's all cascading.
The dollar being the world reserve currency, and the resultant financialization influencing policy, was the disease. Everything else is a symptom.
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @halalmoney 1h
Great insights on Bitcoin specifically and society generally. Much appreciated. Now, time to copy to nostr…..
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0 sats \ 9 replies \ @DarthCoin 3h
LOLOLOLOL from where did you bring this up?
"high trust society" WTF does even mean that?
Bitcoin doesn't fix anything. People fix things. But people are too dumb to see the truth...
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0 sats \ 7 replies \ @billytheked 2h
I think what OP might be saying is that the US is "high trust" in the sense that the people living there are primarily trusting of one another. But I could be wrong.
Could you elaborate on how being a sovereign individual wrt the state apparatus relates to trust? I haven't thought too much about this tbh.
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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @kepford OP 1h
You are correct. I am describing what I have observed living my life in the US. Dealing with people much older than myself and also growing up around people from lower trust societies.
Examples.
Anyone from a former Soviet state has always been less trusting in my experience. People from India as well. Many from South America.
As @DarthCoin says Americans seem foolish and to older Americans people with low trust in other people seem cynical.
I was not specifically referring to trust in the state or institutions but that trust has errorded as well. I wasn't making a value judgement on either of these. I think I understand why both occur.
As Darth points out trust between individuals is easier and in small communities you see higher trust than in large cities.
I think Bitcoin is a tool and it works in both cultures but it's vital in low trust societies and especially in a connected world we have today.
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74 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 1h
Bitcoin is exactly that thing that was lost during centuries of controlled money domination and now it could bring back that "glue" that create a trust between individual trades. It cannot be faked like many other form of money. And exactly that is what world needs right now.
But as I said, without people that are waking up and step out from the old system, bitcoin is totally useless. No matter how much we want to trade using bitcoin, but we still go back to old system, we will not gonna make it, we will stagnate in the same cage.
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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 10m
If it is not used for trade then it is unused. And if it's only financialized then it's still unused. Finance serves nothing if there is no trade that it finances.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 35m
Yeah, the problems and solutions come from people. People make tools that can help or hurt. Sometimes the tool can do both. Bitcoin is amoral. But it's honest and doesn't REQUIRE trust.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 2h
OP didn't refer to a trust in a state, as gov apparatus, he refers to society as a bunch of people.
But how would you have trust in a society ? You can't.
Trust is earned between individuals. Society is just a word, nothing real.
And bitcoin is just a tool, that in good hands could make good things, but in wrong hands could do bad things.
So saying that "bitcoin fixes this" is quite stupid.
As long as people are stupid and do not use bitcoin properly, bitcoin will fix absolutely nothing. That's why I posted that meme.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @billytheked 18m
Its hard for me to think about how trust in society (or trust between people in communities) would be affected by bitcoin adoption.
I generally think that higher trust exists in smaller communities. I think the coordination advantages of living among fewer people is probably related. Also, the cooperation needed to maintain these communities -- absent the desire or ability to defer, as a default, all problems to a higher authority -- probably helps.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 11m
You cannot trust a society... only its individual members. Society is just a concept, a group of people, but every of those people are very different individuals, even that they form a common goal in something.
You cannot say "I trust X" and because X trusted Y and Z "I also trust 100 of X". That's stupid and is not trust, is just blind following, like sheeps.
Trust is bond earned very hard between individuals, not fictitious entities.
Trust a society is like saying I trust all SN as a community. That is plain stupid. You cannot know very well and build a trust relation with somebody from a society that you don't know who is a member or what they do.
I trust NOBODY online, even that are 2 stackers here on SN that knows me in real life.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 47m
And yet you @DarthCoin do not enable Bitcoin LN payments on your SN account.
You deliberately BOYCOTT BTC p2p MoE here on SNs.
@DarthCoin is a blatant arsemilking hypocrit.
Boycott @DarthCoin until he re enables his SNs BTC MoE wallet.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @winteryeti 1h
Oh FFS, we haven't been a trust society since the late 1960s. It's only gotten progressively worse since then.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 15m
It's geographically very different.
West coast cities, with a lot of high-tech folks, and a lot of immigration - much, much lower trust.
More central, more rural - much more trust, especially in more religious areas. It's a really noticeable difference.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @fourrules 2h
We're in a low trust society and getting lower because our consensus forming systems are succumbing to entropy. Bitcoin doesn't fix this, not immediately, but it offers stable ground for people who want to solve it to do so in future.
The way to do it is to challenge the existing paradigm of social media, to aggregate events using LLMs and optimise for consensus with a monetisation strategy that supports that process.
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