This ties interestingly to the news about Bitcoin power usage from last week: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mi...
The beauty of Bitcoin is an inherently-trustworthy transaction structure without the need for a central authority or trust between parties. The cost is exactly what you describe - trust is replaced by a massive expenditure of work to independently verify everything. It's an interesting microcosm of what's happening throughout society in general.
Re:The Rise of Workplace Surveillance
by dredmorbius on Monday November 06, 2017 @11:20AM
(#15636483)
David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, has made just that point. I can't quote it enough (three times so far at my Reddit blog):
Decentralisation is the paramount feature in bitcoin, but it turns out that that's a bad idea that's really, really expensive, because it turns out that a tiny bit of trust saves you a fortune.
"Decentralised" isn't a useful buzzword in a lot of ways, because it turns out that you want to be a part of society.
From his interview with the Financial Times:
This is a case of paradox of composition -- whilst at a personal scale improved communications can increase trust, at a mass scale, the tendency seems to be to undermine it. This increasingly strikes me as a problem.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6jqakv/communi...
In a world without high-speed, high-bandwidth, rapid, and reliable communications, you have to extend, and rely on, trust between individuals. Cultures evolve systems (usually religious) to create and foster a sufficiently-reliable trust network.
As communications improve, reliance on that trust diminishes. You no longer need to be able to rely on a person working in your interest for days, or weeks, or months, or years. You can check on them at a moment's notice. You can monitor them continuously, across a wide range of metrics, without their conscious awareness.
A domain built on Trust becomes instead Panopticon.
(Further discussions of trust: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=trust&restrict...)