How Trust Actually Works
What is trust? Trust is believing in people or institutions that they will not betray you, because they have a reputation. And where does that reputation come from? Think about the people you trust most. You’ve spent time with them. You’ve exchanged messages, shared meals, worked on things together, helped each other out. Trust emerges from the sum of all these interactions.
That’s how trust works in the real world: not through a single moment of verification, but through repeated, reliable information exchange. The more you interact with someone, the more data points you have. And the sum of those data points is what we call trust.
Now here’s the thing, almost none of our digital infrastructure reflects this. Social media gives us follower counts. Institutions give us credit scores. Platforms give us star ratings. These are proxies at best, and they all depend on some central authority that has its own interests in the outcome. Worse, they flatten something deeply human into a single number, an average across thousands of strangers whose standards, expectations, and contexts you know nothing about.
A Different Model
My friend Anton is building something called Web of Trust that tries to change this. The idea: a decentralized network where trust isn’t assigned by a platform but emerges naturally from actual interactions between people.
The architecture is designed to support any form of information exchange. Messages, shared documents, collaborative work, all of it cryptographically signed, all of it stored locally with the people involved, all of it without a central authority. And in the future, shareable with friends and groups through encrypted group messaging based on the MLS protocol.
The key insight is that trust isn’t a binary state. It’s not “verified” or “not verified”. It’s a spectrum, built up over time through the sum of interactions. And that’s exactly what Web of Trust is designed to capture.
Where It Stands
The project is still early. Right now, the reference implementation supports one core primitive: attestations, digitally signed statements about real events. “Anton helped organize the community workshop”, signed by me, stored with Anton, verifiable by anyone in the network.
It’s a small starting point, but it’s the right one. Every interaction that can be attested becomes a building block of trust. And the system is built to grow: the underlying architecture supports messaging, encrypted collaboration, and more, all decentralized, all end-to-end encrypted.
Can you even adequately represent the chaotic, irrational quality of trust in a digital system? I’m not sure. But starting the attempt is already something great.
