In government, you have the UK voting to remove itself from the EU, and then when the referendum passed, the prime minister resigning, all of the major proponents of the referendum resigning, and Scotland threatening to secede from the UK (again). You have a U.S. president who starts his term with under 50% approval rates, the lowest since WW2 [1], to cries of "not my president", and Congressional approval ratings below 20%. You've got continued polarization - instead of converging on compromise candidates in the center, the Republicans has moved rightwards toward nominating actual Nazis (5 running in 2018) [2], and the Democrats have moved leftwards toward nominating actual socialists [3].
In the media, you've got an Overton Window that doesn't overlap - no matter where you are on the spectrum, there are publications with a large readership who are publishing what you perceive to be blatant falsehoods. Take a look at the comment sections of the same story on Breitbart [4] and News & Guts [5]. Could you imagine a reader of one reading the other with any sort of any open mind? Would you consider anything you read there an example of trust?
In science, you have movements such as anti-vaxxers who would reject one of the most important health advances of the last century because they don't trust it. You have continued rejection of climate science, largely because it's inconvenient. You have a replication crisis in many social scientists.
In public spaces - go to an airport and listen to the loudspeaker say "Please report any unattended baggage or suspicious persons to the nearest TSA agent" and think about what that's saying about the level of trust in society and the constant messages of fear. There was another recent story on HN about air marshals secretly tailing random civilians [6]; that's not exactly something that happens in a society that trusts its citizens. There's also continuing helicopter parenting [7] and the assumption that everything around you is dangerous, which tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And in labor markets - I did a bunch of market research on a startup to fix unemployment a couple years ago. My hypothesis was that with all the startups desperate for workers, and workers desperate for jobs, it was a simple information problem to match up supply to demand and make everything efficient. What I found was that hiring isn't really an information problem, it's a trust problem - employers are terrified of getting a bad hire and so reject a lot of candidates that with a little training could be great employees, and similarly employees are terrified of ending up in a career dead-end and so are unwilling to invest in significant self-study or commit to a career path or potential employer. End result - unemployment and underemployment even though there are both workers and jobs available.
All of these are pretty far afield from cryptocurrencies, but you asked why I believe the #1 problem in the world is lack of trust, and that's why. A world where people trust each other is one where they're willing to take risks on the assumption that they won't be taken advantage of, and that is...very far from the state of the world right now.
[1] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
[2] https://www.vox.com/2018/7/9/17525860/nazis-russell-walker-a...
[3] http://www.cc.com/video-clips/jzbxb9/the-daily-show-with-tre...
[4] https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/29/trump-wa...
[5] https://www.newsandguts.com/trump-will-shut-government-doesn...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17635761
[7] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-...
I agree that trust in institutions is a problem but blockchain won't solve it. It will just displace it. In return if you aren't careful you'll lose the benefits of third party arbitrators. The very thing that in the current system gives you any hope of righting the wrongs that the systems you don't trust have inflicted on you.
It's quite probable that rather than making things better cryptocoins will make them worse. It's also quite probably that they will devolve into the very thing they were trying to avoid becoming. As a case in point: Ethereum forked because of a bug in a smart contract. A central authority had to step in to right a wrong. (You can't trust people to write correct software). And that was early on in the cryptocurrency history. There will be more such occasions and each one will prove that not only can you not trust your bank to always get it right. You also can't trust the cryptocurrency developers or the smart contract developers.
Yes Ethereum forked, but that actually gives users a choice, and still does. Some people who disagree with the choice to step in can still run and transact using Ethereum Classic. With both Bitcoin & Ethereum, market forces seem to be doing a decent job of maintaining consensus.
It's similar to another example. I moved my mom over to use Linux as her operating system. I now know, for a fact, that her system is secure and updated. I trust the distribution to audit and package software safely, therefore my stress levels are much much lower and I barely get technical support questions from my mother, compared to before.
Smart contracts enable this same level of trust to develop for complex protocols between people & computers, like mortgages, insurance, DNS, software package building and distibution systems. It allows for advances levels of trust to develop in the system itself, and as an engineer I can now transmit that trust through my web of relationships which is how it reach and benefit non technical users. In a way, it allows for engineers to take more responsibility for the systems we live within, versus today where you have to pay me to give a shit and I try to take as little responsibility for the systems I support because I know they are fucked up and broken and I don't want to be the one on the hook when someone gets hurt by the system I and responsible for.
A trick I like ot do is to replace the word trust with "adhesion", a more precise word. It focuses the debate on a narrow phenomena and enable a different framework of thought. It also suggests conclusions about what's happening and highlights interesting features.
Our conscious decisions are made inside a symbolic fabric. For the sake of the arguments, let's reduce human beings to symbolic organisms living in an information ecosystem. That ecosystem is grounded in a physical reality, which govern its functionning. The way it works when embodied in parchment scrolls is different from the way it works when it's printed text.
What we usullay call information revolution is what happens when the physical artefacts underpining our information ecosystem change. When it happens it also changes the laws of our symbolic reality. A mental universe where, using google instant, one is able to refine a query, ten discover what she is actually looking for, learn that it actually exists, find related topics, compare them, find highly relevant comments, again and again... dozens of times a day is a totally different mental universe than the one we had merely 20 years ago.
If you were to close your eyes, suppress any thoughts about your physical surroundings, consider how we collectively process information and compare it to previous era, you would conclude that our minds have been propulsed into a sci-fi future and are living some kind of star trek fantasy.
That is maybe controversial, but the consequences about who we have become are interesting. Using again the symbolic organism metaphor, as the governing laws of our symbolic reality have changed, we also have evolved. Far more than we acknowledge. Our inner selves are being projected so far in the future, we are becoming aliens to our previous selves. Imagine if the strength of gravity was reduced to a thousandth of its current strength. The effect it would have on our bodies would be dramatic. That is what is happening to us.
You don't have to agree with that, but if you do you will start to see the problem. Our institutions which really are symbolic machinery or building, have been built implicitly following the laws of our symbolic reality. But while we are changing under the action of our new environment, our institutions are not.
The distance is growing, between people and the institutions that purport to guide them. As if they are gliding through them. They are less and less made of the same matter. What we are witnessing is an adhesion crisis.
Wearing those lenses, you will see more and more signs of what you mentionned in your comment. Lack of trust is the form it takes when people are actively engaging in a particular situation like during elections. Most of the time a growing minority is subconsciously deconnecting from institutions without even realizing it and without an ounce of ill will. Right now, some tech workers, working in Big Co are reading this site at this very moment, just to relax a little bit. Not realizing it's the 21st century equivalent of reading a anarcho-communist rag at lunch time while working for Ford circa 1920. The difference is nowadays you have to do it to stay relevant.
As times goes, that hidden "negative" adhesion potential, is building up, opening some cracks here and there. It is passively looking for anything, institution-like, that will help channel it's energy. And crypto looks like something that at least address the problem.
That's a pretty strong statement, one that I would disagree with, mostly because it's so vague. How did you come to that conclusion?