When we talk about blockchain, we are essentially exploring how to establish a permissionless trust consensus in the digital world.
From 'roots' to 'trunk'
In (Web3 General Knowledge (1)), we reached a key understanding: Web3 cannot exist independently of the real world.
It is not a utopia floating in the air, but deeply rooted in the reality of physical hardware, financial laws, social organizations, and the existing cognition of humanity.
However, understanding this 'interdependence' is just a starting point.
Next, we must answer a more fundamental question: since Web3 is so constrained by reality, what irreplaceable new value does it actually bring? Why is this integration worth happening?
The answer lies in the word that is often mentioned but rarely understood deeply - 'trust'.
This does not refer to personal trust in a familiar society, but rather a new, systematic, programmable trust. Let's start with a simple thought experiment.
The 'dark forest' of the digital world
Suppose you want to buy a digital album online. Under the traditional Internet model, you need to:
Registering an account on a centralized platform.
Trust that the platform will properly safeguard your payment information.
Trust that after receiving payment, the platform will accurately transfer the 'ownership' of the album to you.
Trust that the platform will not casually take down the album, change licensing terms, or suddenly shut down services.
In this process, all your trust is placed in a single centralized institution. It is both the rule maker and the referee, as well as the sole asset custodian.
This brings about the classic 'trust dilemma': efficiency, security, and autonomy are hard to achieve simultaneously.
You may enjoy the convenience of payment, but you have relinquished actual control over data and assets, and bear the risk of platform malfeasance, hacking, or unilateral changes to rules.
The emergence of blockchain is precisely to solve this dilemma.
Its core innovation is not the surface-level 'decentralization', but the realization of an unprecedented 'trustlessness' environment through a clever set of mathematical and cryptographic mechanisms.
'Trustlessness' does not mean no trust is needed, but rather that you do not need to trust a trading partner or any specific intermediary; you only need to trust the mathematical rules and open-source code.
The object of trust has shifted from a potentially defaulting person or institution to a system protocol that cannot be unilaterally tampered with.
The three layers of blockchain consensus
How does blockchain create this 'systemic trust'?
We can break it down into three progressively layered consensus levels:
First layer: data consensus
A globally synchronized, publicly transparent, chronologically ordered ledger.
Every transaction is packaged into a 'block' and cryptographically linked to the previous block, forming a 'chain'.
It has immutability. Modifying data in any one historical block requires simultaneously modifying all subsequent blocks and controlling more than 51% of the computing power in the network, which is extremely costly and nearly impossible in practice.
Thus, the historical record becomes trustworthy. You do not need to trust what anyone says; you only need to consult this public ledger.
Second layer: state consensus
Blockchain not only records transactions but also maintains a globally consistent 'global state'.
For example, on Ethereum, this state includes each account's ETH balance, the current data and code of each smart contract.
It ensures deterministic rule execution. A smart contract is a piece of code deployed on the chain that executes automatically. Once predetermined conditions are met, the contract will execute operations deterministically, without human intervention.
You are not trusting the contract author, but the fact that the code will operate according to public logic.
Third layer: value consensus
Based on the first two layers of consensus, people reach a consensus on 'what is valuable' in a global, open network.
The value consensus of Bitcoin is 'digital gold'; Ethereum is the 'world computer' and a tool for paying gas fees; the value consensus of a certain NFT may come from the community identity or artistic culture it represents.
It allows permissionless participation and exit.
Anyone connected to the network can access it, verify the rules, and participate in value exchange based on their judgment.
Trust no longer relies on the endorsement of a particular country or the brand of a specific company, but on the shared belief of global participants in the network rules and the value they carry.
This is a bottom-up, dynamically evolving social contract.
Trust costs, organizational forms, and value paradigms
Understanding the essence of blockchain as a 'trust machine', we can see what it specifically reconstructs:
The cost structure of reconstructing trust
In traditional society, establishing trust requires high costs: legal contracts, notary agencies, credit investigations, brand building, and long-term reputation accumulation... these costs are ultimately passed on to all commercial activities.
Blockchain puts a large amount of verification and execution costs upfront in one go, while reducing marginal trust costs to nearly zero.
A successful smart contract deployment can provide an automated, uncontroversial trust basis for countless future similar transactions.
Reconstructing the collaborative form of organizations
Based on smart contracts and token economics, DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, have emerged.
It allows global anonymous individuals to collaborate and allocate resources based only on shared goals and rules, without the need for traditional corporate structures.
Trust is no longer based on hierarchical superior appointments, but on transparent records of contributions and shared adherence to rules.
This represents a fundamental shift in trust from 'trusting people' to 'trusting rules'.
Reconstructing the originality of digital value
In Web2, the value of digital items, similar to game items or virtual gifts, completely relies on the platform that issues them.
The platform collapses, and its value drops to zero.
In Web3, the ownership records of blockchain-based assets are kept on a public ledger, not relying on any single server.
Even if the initial issuing website shuts down, you can still see it in your wallet and trade it in other markets supporting that standard.
Value is first internalized in the digital object itself, rather than in the platform that hosts it.
This lays the trust foundation for digital property rights.
The transfer of trust, not its disappearance
We must clearly recognize that blockchain achieves a transfer and transformation of trust, rather than a complete elimination of trust.
You no longer trust banks, but you need to trust that Bitcoin's code does not have fatal vulnerabilities.
You no longer trust centralized exchanges, but you need to trust the private key management scheme of multi-signature wallets.
You no longer trust the contract executor, but you need to trust that the logic of the smart contract code has no bugs.
Risks have never disappeared; they have only changed form.
Code vulnerabilities, economic model design flaws, private key management mistakes, protocol governance deadlocks... these have become new sources of risk.
At the same time, as we discussed in the first article, this digital trust system ultimately needs to find value anchors in the real world, such as fiat currency channels, legal recourse, and physical utility.
Towards a programmable trust society
Blockchain, as a 'trust machine', is great not because it creates a perfect world without trust, but because it provides humanity for the first time with a programmable, verifiable, globally applicable foundational trust protocol.
It is trying to provide a standardized 'trust protocol' for the transfer of value and execution of contracts, just as the Internet provided standard protocols for information transmission.
This protocol is still in its early, clumsy, and expensive stages, but its paradigm potential is enormous: transforming trust from an expensive social capital into a widely accessible foundational resource.
Once we understand this, we have grasped the key to understanding all the Web3 infrastructure.
They are all applications experimenting to solve specific domain problems on this 'trust machine'.
However, establishing trust is only half of the story.
When value can flow globally at an extremely low trust cost, one of the most direct and powerful application areas emerges - finance.
This brings us to the third core topic of our series of general knowledge:
Stay tuned: (Web3 General Knowledge (3): The Essence of DeFi)
We will explore: How is DeFi trying to reconstruct Wall Street with code? What is the fine line between liquidity mining and a Ponzi scheme? When 'code is law' meets a 'black swan' market, what ultimate truths about human nature and systems is this great financial experiment revealing?
Next chapter
(Web3 General Knowledge (3): The Essence of DeFi)
