The Universal Trust Machine: A survey on the Web3 path towards enabling long term digital cooperation through decentralised trust

Abstract

Since the dawn of human civilization, trust has been the core challenge of social organization. Trust functions to reduce the effort spent in constantly monitoring others' actions in order to verify their assertions, thus facilitating cooperation by allowing groups to function with reduced complexity. To date, in modern societies, large scale trust is almost exclusively provided by large centralized institutions. Specifically in the case of the Internet, Big Tech companies maintain the largest Internet platforms where users can interact, transact and share information. Thus, they control who can interact and conduct transactions through their monopoly of online trust. However, as recent events have shown, allowing for-profit corporations to harness so much power and act as gatekeepers to the online world comes with a litany of problems. While so far ecosystems of trust on the Internet could only be feasibly created by large institutions, Web3 proponents have a vision of the Internet where trust is generated without centralised actors. They attempt to do so by creating an ecosystem of trust constructed using decentralised technology. This survey explores this elusive goal of Web3 to create a "Universal Trust Machine", which in a true decentralised paradigm would be owned by both nobody and everybody. In order to do so, we first motivate the decadesold problem of generating trust without an intermediary by discussing Robert Axelrod's seminal research on the evolution of cooperation in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Next, we present the infrastructural and social challenges that a hypothetical Universal Trust Machine would have to overcome in order to enable long term cooperation in a decentralised setting. We proceed to present various reputation systems, all of which present promising techniques for encouraging trustworthy behaviour in a decentralised network through indirect reciprocity. After this, we discuss the family of emerging Distributed Ledger technologies whose secure transaction facilitating and privacy preserving techniques promise to be a good complement to the current limitations of vanilla reputation systems. Finally, we conclude by discussing a future roadmap for creating the desired Universal Trust Machine.

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“…This can lead to the development of more resilient and innovative Internet infrastructure, as well as more equal and inclusive social media marketing practices. Madhwal and Pouwelse (2023) introduced the concept of "decentralized trust" and its potential implications for Web3 visions, arguing that traditional trust models, which rely on centralized intermediaries such as banks and governments, are no longer sufficient in the digital age, and so decentralized trust mechanisms are needed to enable more durable cooperation in the next Web3 development.…”