Yeah. The reality is that we enter into very few zero trust transactions. I don’t need a blockchain to guarantee things when the law and contracts have handled that fine for a very long time.
In short, the legal system is pretty useless in enforcing any broken contract that's worth less than a few thousand dollars, especially one of any complexity.
And as an aside, I feel like I enter into low-trust transactions all the time. Don't you?
* I don't trust people who sell products to me online. I've gotten bad product many times. But I need to be able to buy from independent sellers online.
* On a related note, I don't trust half the websites I put my credit card info into. But it's an important part of sending money over the internet.
* I don't trust my ride share drivers or short-term-rental hosts. I could do without short-term-rentals by only staying at trusted hotels, but I can't really do without ride shares.
* When I trade a stock with some random counterparty, I don't trust them to actually deliver the stock to me at T+1. But I need to be able to trade stocks with whoever else can give me the best price.
The typical solution is to have a corporation step in to act as judge and jury for contract breaches that are too small to be worth bringing to court (brokerages, credit card companies, Amazon, PayPal, AirBnB, Uber). In fact, these companies' main value creation has come from adding a layer of trust to traditionally zero-trust transactions. Thus, these zero-trust transactions have been able to thrive while the dispute resolution corporation charges fees for their value-added trust.
The only reason these roles traditionally have to be performed by companies is that autonomous money-custodying software did not exist. But programmable blockchains now allow for this. You could easily imagine a dispute-resolution alternative to PayPal where the organizational structure is a piece of autonomous software directly employing people/AI, rather than a traditional corporate entity.
The vast majority of scams are run through crypto now. In fact, crypto is a step backwards and makes it easier to scam people.
The solution to this is maturity. The endgame is to be able to create smart contracts that are as readable to a layperson, if not more readable, than legal contracts. And to come up with a set of standard smart contract templates vetted by programmers, just as today we have a set of standard legal contract templates vetted by lawyers.
That, and encouraging people to actually read what they sign, whether it's a pen-and-paper signature or a cryptographic signature.
I'll tell my parents to learn JavaScript or Rust to make sure that there is no bug in the smart contracts they are signing.
https://i.imgur.com/MgEw0Bd.png
As a fun fact, a puzzle-piece style editor like this is how I wrote my first computer program as a toddler.
Crypto solves a problem that less than 0.1% of the world have. It's not very useful. Local laws and regulations are way more effective for me.