The Rise of Trust Networks | Manu Alzuru - Blockravers

Manu a big round of applause yeah I like you in the back good hear me okay now all right um yeah welcome everyone I'm going to talk a little bit about trust networks and what I'm seeing how basically trust is evolving um with the rise of blockchains and let's wait a second maybe until we get the uh this Li on all right so yeah I'm Manu um and I'm one of the founding members of block Rivers so first of all let's talk about trust what is trust trust this is what I just asked chag quickly used to tell me trust involves a willingness to rely on actions words or decisions of another party with the expectation that they will behave in a reliable honest and a competent manner so for me trust the way that I see it is that sometimes like if we are in a known place and we going to and we want to go to an unknown place we have to ride into a lot of uncertainty um and for us to get from that known place to that unknown place we need to have some sort of trust whether it's trust in the machine that is taking us from the place a to place b or whether it's the person that is connecting us with person a to person B we always require trust in order to move from one place to another so I believe that trust is the lubricant for society in and why is that because I think I think that the the main course or drivers of trust are for people to feel that they they can trust in someone or they can trust let's say on an institution or something there has to be first competence that you believe that they are able to do what they say that they that they could do um the second one authenticity and that means that they experience that that you're real or that there that organization is real and the other one is empathy that basically that the organ gation or the individuals that they show that they care about your success that they care about your wellbeing and without any of these three elements basically there would there wouldn't be any any form of trust so how can we increase trust in in our society humans we have created different protocols um a simple protocol that we we do is shaking hand hands another protocol that we do is clink cups and say cheers um do any of you know what's the story behind clinking glasses no okay so basically what happened when the monarchs um when the monarchs received someone that visited them and they brought let's say some wine or brought some something to drink they would put they would pour something in in in the in the glass of the person that brought the wine and they will drink it first before the Monarch so as a show of trust if the Monarch trusted the person that was bringing the wine rather than making them drink they would they would clink the glasses and then drink together at the same time so that evolves as a form of saying I trust you and basically we humans we have been incorporating all of these different protocols for uh creating trust another one recent one people doing pinky promises and just putting their their pinky fingers around so one thing that I learned about uh trust thanks to this game uh that I encourage you to scan this QR code and play this game whenever you have time to understand how trust evolves in society and and how trust evolves with different players in in in this game that we call life so some of the learnings from game theory is that for trust to increase we need to have repetitive interactions um and for that also we need to have or we need to create possible win-win situations and we need to reduce the misom the opportunity for for miscommunications and by doing this we basically can increase trust and why am I talking about trust I'm talking about trust is because we are creating trustless protocols in a society where trust is needed so yeah trust has evolved over time so imagine when we were a Thrive or we when when we were not let's say necessarily living in big cities first we have had a form of trust where it was local person to person peer to peer individual to individual within a tribe then when we grew too big we needed to delegate that trust because we couldn't rely on the trust personto person anymore so we had to have something that we call the institutions to basically behave as a proxy for trust so they will enforce let's say some uh rules uh into the population and that will generate some trust within this new Society or with this form of humans that are coming together the thing is that most of these institutions the way that they've been built they're very opaque and right now many of us don't trust any of the institutions people don't trust governments anymore people don't trust religion anymore people trust pretty much any institution we don't know what's real anymore and with the rise of AI even more what is real is it is it basically what the people that have money uh that are able to use um let's say Ai and create different narratives and create different stories is that the new real well now we need to quench question more and more what trust is and how do we create trust in this new society and I I think the way of doing it is by creating it again peer to peer going back to the roots one to one in a distributed Manner and that's what I call the rise of trust networks or distributed trust networks so if we talk about uh the institutions the institutions are very opaque very close centralized usually they're licensed they're top down while distributed um let's say forms of trust should be transparent inclusive decentralized accountable and bottom up but many people in the web three space they think that we are in the distributed side while in reality we're not there at all we are way more in the institutional side what why well ask most of the doubts are very opaque as well not necessarily because they're aou they're open and transparent and actually doing let's say something good for the community but rather enclosing and centralizing and and making decisions closed door most of the time so I really really believe that the future is actually to create new systems that are um that the trust is distributed among different participants so now in this age of platforms we need if we want to go to a known place to a know unknown place and we are let's say in a Marketplace for example if we are in a Marketplace you need to trust the other user that you're interacting with you need to trust the platform itself you need to trust the idea and you need to trust many other things that people sometimes don't question themselves and you need to write on the old this uncertainty so as I said before we are creating trustless systems but hey they are not completely trustless you still need to trust you are trusting the system sys actually that you're using so if we talk about trust what trust is needed so if we talk about for example I'm originally from Venezuela so if we want to talk about Bitcoin being used in Venezuela we need to rely on first having energy sometimes we have eight hours without energy so damn how can we transact with that network if we don't have energy we still need to rely on the trust of having energy we need to rely on the trust of having Hardware that will run this software consensus mechanisms the different economics of the different projects that we're using the regulatory environment that we're trusting the oracles and the data that we're trusting the different security elements um that are being implemented for sa safeguarding the different protocols the privacy and anonimity of the of the protocol do they really have it um also the Community Trust um the protocol trust itself when it comes to emission of different incentives you also are trusting the core team of the different projects that you're using most of the time um you're trusting the da um or you trusting the whales or you trusting the stakeholders or you trusting many different people so as you see this is not a trustless system as everyone talks about uh mostly is a lot of marketing so we need to rethink what the heck is Trust because trust is very complex so yeah very complex so why trust is important to block ravers so for those that don't know what block ravers is block ravers is a community that has been uh for the last five years traveling the world having fun together with friends and we have created a group that is self-curated and we're going to talk a little bit about the experiments on how we got into until what what it is today so yeah I started back in Devcon Osaka in 2019 um and with uh in 2022 we had already over 500 people wanting to join the group and just to party and enjoy the join enjoy the the the community that we have been created where we trust each other so in e in 2023 last year um we we ran we did a party and in that party we invited only people that we vouch for to the party and the people that were vouched for the party we were asked to the vou to the voucher hey do you really vouch for this person and and then if they say yes we will accept them and then they will be able to come to the party why with the idea of creating let's say some sort of accountability of who is inviting the different people to our party um so somehow one day we're partying and then at the end of the part we come and we see a wall and there's a graffiti on the wall and we're like damn this was an Airbnb so we had to pay for that and we're like okay how do we do it well we started looking looking at the um at the different people that we that night with us and we sent a message in the group hey somebody did a graffiti and then somebody sent us a DM and said hey actually the person that made the graffiti uh I heard that it was a friend of mine and I will take responsib ility of it I will pay for it I will do whatever it takes to making it right I don't want to be kicked out of the community the guy was supposed to go to uh Breen Rich together with us and stay in the same house so he was scared that we were going to kick him out um for inviting someone bad to our community so he was you know coming out there and saying you know what I'm going to take responsibility of this so we realized that this is actually super interesting how we can create systems where the community members are accountable for each other um we don't need someone to police us if we are all having trust between each other and we are all observing how we all behaving so in Susu we did something we did we did an experiment um we gave we tell we told people if you want to come to our party come and meet us in person and we're going to give you a Venezuelan bevard that has no monetary value Val and but it has something that makes it very unique and that is the serial number and also the let's say the different uh the different things that the bill has to to make it unique you know so you can see see it against the against the light and so on um so if you think about it the the the bill is kind of like an nft it's a very unique very very unique um um let's say object that is difficult to um falsify let's say so we say okay come and meet us in person grab the bill and instead of instead of uh me giving them an identity and saying this is you you're going to come with the bill and you're going to you're going to take us a picture with the bill and you're going to say this is me and basically we created we created like a social graph with all the serial numbers of the different people that were connecting with each other so for the people to be able to come to our party they had to have three vouchers so people within the community they had to vouch for each other so once they achieve and they had three vouchers that they were cool Vibes to come to the party then they could come and we started doing these experiments and these games why with the intention of creating some form of accountability within the community um we also had this type of system where if someone that you invite let's say har harass a woman or does something bad that person that is harassing gets kicked out but the person that invited them get a gets a jell car and then on the second yellow car they also get kicked out so basically we are creating like systems or ways of creating accountability within communities and we need we need to start focusing on that IRL and also obviously online and yeah with this experiment we uh we actually won the hackathon in sus Salu um the during the Public public goods week as Su connect we did another experiment we you together with the etherum foundation we work uh and we did we did something that was called job mudgies job mudes was literally just an NFC car that had uh a counter inside the NFC car and every time that you will come with your phone you will tap it and it will generate a proof that you met the person in real life and that proof was unique because of the counter that he had every time that you that another person will come with their phone the counter will go up one 2 3 4 and then will generate a new signature every time so like that you could create let's say snapshots of all the different people that you're connecting with and then you can start saying okay I trust that guy a little bit when it comes to let's say math because he showed me uh he shows me that he resolve a mathematical problem or or let's say I trust the other person in in cryptography or I trust other person uh when it comes to uh marketing and stuff like that so you can start creating a social graph where you where you define what are those different elements of trust that you have in different individuals and then you can also start revealing part of your identity to those different individuals let's say that I get to know you for the first time I might give you only my uh email my Telegram and then if we start developing a relationship uh I might give you let's say in a week I might give you my Instagram uh and I start revealing more parts of my identity with zero knowledge proof and basically I can start removing or creating different accesses um uh to people that I trust and not only that I can also connect them connect let's say people that trust me I can connect I can I can create kind of like a social graph that will enable me to connect with my friends and their friends and the people that they trust so like that we can create new systems um let's say the couch surfing model where people were going to different couches and staying at different places also like Airbnb models we can do so many new forms of trust networks that are actually decentralized so Block ravers in the future what is Block ravers in the future well the last the last few months I've been I've been um understanding more and more more that trust is is so complex that even uh even though I've been studying and analyzing a lot I'm still failing I'm still failing in identifying uh let's say patterns that make me let's say say I shouldn't trust this person or I shouldn't trust that other person I'm still making mistakes all the time um and I'm sure we're going to continue doing creating mistakes all the time but yeah we I believe that in the future the way that we're going to create these new systems of trust has to be with this social graph of people peer-to-peer and also it will be very contextual if we start put putting a number to trust then basically we're going to fall into creating a social score which is not necessarily what I'm advocating for uh what I'm advocating for is creating let's say different forms of social graphs are very contextual and it will depend on each individual and each individual will decide who are the different persons or who are the different let's say oracles or apis that they trust so yeah that's basically what I came to you to talk about uh trust networks and if you want to learn more uh please reach out um and if you want to be part of the block ravers crew scan this QR code that's it thanks everyone