This phrase is one of the known mottos of the Web3 space, often used by Web3 Foundation, Polkadot, and its founder Gavin Wood. It is important to add more context to this statement: Trust is not inherently bad.
Human-based trust might be deemed bad, but trusting a verifiable system through irrefutable rules of science, or battle-tested game theoretic reasons is not necessarily bad.
I believe the authors of this statement meant “Trust” as human-based trust, and “Truth” as science-based trust. I would rephrase it as:
Less human-based trust, more science-based trust.
Or, we can replace human-based and science-based with one of their corresponding properties.
Trust
The property of us believing an Authority behaves according to some rules.
Trust can be categorized into the following:
Human-based Trust
- Conditional: What is expected to happen might not happen
- Corruptible: Something else than what was expected might happen
- Limited or Permissioned: Some people might get excluded from the system
- Not easily auditable (discussed in Execution, Ordering, History and State Machines): Records of what was done in the past may or may not be available.
Science-based Trust
- Reliable: What is expected will always happen
- Verifiable: What is expected will always happen correctly, and anyone can verify this.
- Accessible, Permissionless: Anyone can join the system according to the rules
- Easily auditable (discussed in Execution, Ordering, History and State Machines): Records of what was done in the past are always available.
This type of trust is said to have Resilience.
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For example:
Less corruptible trust, more verifiable trust.
Or,
Less conditional trust, more reliable trust.
Therefore, there is no reason to always frown upon the use of “We are trusting …”, and no need to be excited about “We are removing trust from …“. It all depends on the context.
End of the day, we cannot deny that we trust the rules of math and science that lead to the credibility of a system like Bitcoin as well.