Nick Szabo  🔑

Tell that to AirBnb. @naval

AirBnB, Uber, etc., all have had to go thru serious rethinks about the nature of their user base as it scaled, as they entered new cities and new cultures, etc. And AirBnB seems to have hit some severe limits on the kinds of hosts and kinds of guests it is suitable for.

The huge differential are due to fundamental trust and knowledge issues between strangers that AirBnB has only extremely partially been able to overcome. Turns out the world of travelers is not one big happy community. It's a bunch of strangers. Price differentials remain.

"Community" in this case being a handful of CEOs pretending that they speak for large numbers of people.

Exactly. They are limited in their social scale just like everybody else, even though they often make a living out of pretending otherwise.

It had trust minimization in the protocol even though the small community in 2010 probably could have trusted each other. Such protocol is what made it socially scalable, not that community. A village-sized trusting community in 2010 won't grow into a much bigger such community.

It's not a community, it's just a group of mostly mutual strangers, that is why Sybil attacks are possible.

How much does the trust go away and how much does it move? Example, I don't need to strongly trust my bank's mobile app because my contract with them says they will protect and take responsibility for my funds. A Bitcoin open source mobile app needs to be completely trusted.

Nope. You can verify every line of code.

There’s multiple examples of open source projects with vulnerabilities in them. Still a moot point because how are you going to verify your hardware didn’t come rooted? Self sovereignty is not a good idea for normal people.