Could trust as a service be the next big thing in Blockchains?

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Introduction

With it being so close to Christmas many of us are making online purchases. Right now it is mostly using conventional means of payment.

At a future time this will likely shift to greater blockchain payments and this may bring up the issue of trust.

For example if you are making low value purchases from an established merchant (e.g. Amazon) you probably don't need them to guarantee trust because they have been around long enough that you just trust them implicitly.

They are well established enough for you as a consumer to feel protected and to trust that they will send you the item when you make your payment even if that payment is in cryptocurrency.

This is backed by the years of experience that other consumers have and that you have yourself.

They have "brand" based reputation that grants them trust.

Unfortunately most established merchants don't accept these forms of payment.

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Consumer Risk

The risk for you as a consumer comes when you are buying from a peer or a new merchant whom you have not established trust with.

That is usually the situation you find yourself in when using a cryptocurrency to purchase an item or service.

Once you have sent your BTC (for example) then there is no way for you to be certain that they will actually send you what you ordered and there is no recourse for you to get your money back if they don't.

Right now there are informal escrow services being provided by individuals and small companies but again we come down to the issue of trust.

I feel there is a gap in the market for a large company to establish themselves in the blockchain "trust" business.

This could be both to provide trust to the consumer and alternatively to provide trust in the consumer which I will explain below.

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The First Step of Trust Dilemma

A new organisation selling trust has a number of issues to overcome but the main one is how do they prove they are trustworthy when you have never used them before and they are not a famous or established business?

To be honest I don't have an easy solution for this. If a new company can come up with a way to do this in a satisfactory way then it would give them a massive head-start.

One way for a new company to do this would be to team up with a company that already has established "trust" credentials e.g. Amazon.

That is not an ideal solution though as it is simply using someone else's trust. Further why would they (i.e. Amazon) not just roll out such a service themselves?

A business which is already established in the field of retail, money or finance (e.g. Amazon, Apple Pay or Google Wallet) would therefore potentially have a massive advantage in entering this field since people would already be trusting them with their money.

I would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this so please let me know what ideas you have. Can you think of an alternative to get around the "First Step" dilemma?

Anyway let's move on to looking at the use cases in a bit more detail:

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The Main Situations Where You Might Need to Buy Trust Services

These are the main areas I can think of right now but please suggest any cases that I may have missed in the comments:

• Buying from a stranger who is not an established merchant in a peer to peer situation. This will be the most common use initially.
• High value purchases from established merchants who might require some credentials from the purchaser e.g. cars, houses etc. - these are done through trusted merchants currently and those merchants may require greater verification for legal reasons/AML etc.
• High risk purchases that have legal implications e.g. chemicals, medications, fertiliser. For obvious reasons these have legal restrictions on trade and are likely to be something that becomes more important as blockchains mature as payment and settlement structures within established industries.
• Obtaining legal documents such as passports, driving licenses etc. - also probably more of a long-term thing as these are often provided by government.

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Potential Trust Based Services

This is by no means an exhaustive list but these are the main ones I can think of:

1. Secured and Insured Escrow. This is the initial use case. Right now finding a trusted Escrow is a question of asking other people in places such as Bitcointalk. You need to trust in order to find someone to trust which is problematic. Whilst a private company would require some blind trust initially over time it's size and reputation should eventually help to improve this. Further there could be some sort of insurance involved.

2. ID and reputation management. Your trust provider could be your single point of providing proof of who you are and managing your reputation for payment - the equivalent of your passport/driver's license with a sort of credit reference agency. This could involve different levels of trust and identity verification (1 vs 2 vs 3 factor authentication) depending on the transaction level.

3. Digital CVs and legal documents. This is really an extension of point 2. Blockchains provide a means of storing information with redundancy in a distributed database of sorts. They can also provide a degree of verification that a particular document was created at a particular point in time. This could offer an added protection against fraud (although it is not perfect). There are also potential ways of improving legitimacy by cross linking and referencing other documents which may eventually also be stored on blockchains. Envision a situation where your CV/resume references your qualifications by linking to your actual degree certificates which are digitally signed by the appropriate qualifications body. Similar situations could occur with legal documents such company registrations, deeds to land etc.

4. Arbitration and Dispute Resolution. This will become more important as blockchain use cases expand, whenever you have human beings involved disputes will arise. Arbitration could be a useful tool in these situations and a trusted third party would be required. A company that already has a reputation and infrastructure for providing trust would be in a prime situation to also offer these kinds of services.

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Established Companies Have a Big Advantage

I think this is unfortunately a situation where large established organisations will have a big advantage. Like it or not people already trust them with so much information and I think there are two large types of companies which could take advantage of this:

• Companies which already manage our online personas and finances e.g. Google, Apple, Facebook etc.
• Banks and Insurance Companies - obviously they already have our money and information.

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Why do these organisations have an advantage?

1. They have huge resources and capital.
2. They have access to government and legal structures due to point 1. in a way that a new company would not.
3. They have massive existing infrastructure and human resources with the ability to deploy it.
4. They are existing brands that the public already trust (as previously mentioned).

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What is against them

1. There is growing discontent with their actions - e.g. distrust of banks since the financial crises of recent times, discomfort with privacy policies of online companies etc.
2. They tend to be expensive (particularly in the case of banks) whether in terms of actual money or what they require from you in return (e.g. selling your privacy).
3. As large organisations they are slow to act and have the potential to be left behind when it comes to new developments.

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Conclusions

I think trust will likely become a greater need as we move forward with blockchain based payments and services. There are notable problems which must be overcome for a new company trying to provide trust based solutions.

The most notable one in my opinion is the "First Step Dilemma".

If a new company can overcome this issue then there is a huge potential for profit.

Unfortunately this also grants established companies a huge advantage.

What do you think?

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Thank you for reading.

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