maybe in part - but is that a bad thing?

governments and large companies try to foster trust by being old, being around for a long time, and being big. those things - age espeically - are really only a _proxy_ for reputation, which is what uber, airbnb and lift thrive on. if they are better at delivering trust because their reputation mechanism works better than 'hey we've been around a long time' then they'll do better.

it doesn't mean the 'old economy' is lost - it's just that now they're being given a chance to reinvent themselves. it's no longer enough to be big and powerful to get people to trust you - now you need to establish a positive reputation as well. we're seeing that happen already, as companies try to help you if you bitch at them on twitter.

as of now, a celebrity complaining about bad service on twitter is far more likely to be helped than some random nobody. again - this is because our reputation systems are weak. most people know who ashton kutcher is, and if he's pissed off at a brand, they're going to take his opinion much more seriously than some guy they've never met.

so now imagine social networks all having something akin to linkedin's "how are you connected to this person" - you see someone with a bunch of bad ratings by people two hops from you on your social graph. it doesn't matter that you don't know them - you're going to put a bunch more weight on their negative ratings than you will the thousands of positive ratings given by people who are 8 hops from you, with most of those hops travelling through someone who's labelled as a 'spammer' by a woman your brother's college girlfriend used to play hockey with.

it's possible for us to know those kinds of things now, but it's very difficult. when that becomes the norm, and easy, it won't matter if yelp moves people's reviews up and down, and charges money for business to 'hide' bad reviews - if i can see all the reviews and i know my relationships to those people, i can assign the weights based upon who i know. right now, yelp is assigning the weights as they see fit - but if i label yelp's weights as "untrustworthy," people who trust me are also likely to do the same - so everyone has the incentive to be as honest as possible. screwing over strangers can screw you, because those strangers have relationships, too.

right now, and historically, we use all kinds of things as proxies for trustworthiness. age, style of dress, language, education, diction, body language, facial expressions - all of those things are easily gameable, but throughout most of history i couldn't ask everybody i know to ask everyone they know 'hey have you ever worked with this lawyer.' with all the tech we have now, it's trivial to do that, and i can stay away from a lawyer that several of my friend's friends friends have had bad dealings with. at present, he can fight anyone who says something bad about him and force that information to be removed from the public record. with a reputation network secured by a blockchain, that isn't possible - and now the block chain has a record of 'this guy tries to silence his critics.' contrast that to 'almost everyone who has criticized him has been also criticized by someone on or near your network, and many of the people who have criticized him later posted records saying that he rectified the situation. all the bullshit, fake smiles, nice suits and radio ads in the world can't make up for that information.

adopting a system like this also solves problems like voting and government issues of 'who gets rights' - instead of an 'official registry of people who are real people' - we get a graph of 'identities which i respect and value'. someone who is pro-life can say he values everyone who is alleged to have been concieved. if we can't find transactions from his node to most of hte nodes he says he supports, some of us may find him suspsicious, some of us may not. the beauty of this is that no one person owns it - it allows all of us to associate with people who operate underprinciples we like. the more accepting you are of other people, the wider the network you'll have to work with. you're free to be closed minded with selective principles; if that works for you, that's fine - but if you find that you need to interact daily with people who you think are sinners and bad people, it might force you to reconsider your perspective.

you even get rid of things like spam! some guy who owns thousands of computers with fake accounts has to get someone to vouch for them being trustworthy people, and anyone who does that risks permanent damage to their reputation.