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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

Stepping outside the main thrust of the article...

> The functionality of personal property has not under normal conditions ever depended on trusted third parties.

If so, it's the sign you have a low trust society in a more general sense. In a high trust society it's easy to say "This is my personal property, no one is going to mess with it". Things like your car being out front the next day, or your goats not getting stolen, and any number of social expectations are quietly met every day. You don't behave like the police of your property all night and are able to get a good nights sleep. This allows you to get a job as a specialist and make a good income, along with all your neighbors which brings more prosperity.

Trusting vs not trusting come with different costs that must be calculated.

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Well the context of the article is at the time recent, buggy implmentations of ssl and other security protocols which were at the time unproven security protocols, and government entities providing black-box crypto with either explicit or occult back doors. If by high-trust you mean I'm going to trust a government entity's protocol or implmentation of a security protocol which doesn't provide decent forward secrecy or non-repudiation, well then, even in a high-trust environment that sounds like a bad idea.

trusting is indeed probably always more efficient than not-trusting -- however, the crux of the matter is what your options are when trusting is not possible. you can always choose to trust in the presence of a trustless mechanism, but it does not work the other way around.

People trusted their shiny Teslas to be fine out front with the key protected at home. Then thieves figured out that the keys were most likely just behind the front door and used signal boosters to unlock and start the car.

A paranoid owner putting the key in a small Faraday caged box would not have that problem. With all the smart things we use today the attack surface is not insignificant and thinking about it is just common sense.

>If so, it's the sign you have a low trust society in a more general sense.

Isn't that kind of orthogonal to the question? I can envision both high or low trust societies that could have problems with required 3rd parties attached to personal property.

Even the most well intentioned and highly trusted 3rd party is still susceptible to malicious attacks, or just incompetence or plain old accidents.

Scale is the question. Some societies you can get by with trusting others, once in a while you lose, but the gain overall from being able to trust your stuff will still be there is much more.

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