entails risk—it is much easier to trust your neighbor than it is to trust a supplier across an ocean—but institutions that facilitate trust have allowed us to form societies that create and innovate on a global scale. Today, trust pervades every part of the modern economy. You can see this in the money we use that is backed by the full “faith” and “credit” of the government . New institutions, like the ones that allow strangers to get into our cars or to sleep in our homes , also build trust.
Many blockchain proponents believe the technology will allow us to manage the exchange of money or property rights without the burden of bureaucratic rules and outdated systems imposed by old institutions. However, blockchain technology can be useful for jumpstarting trust in new institutions in developing countries.and economic experiments suggest that trust is earned through repeated interaction, forged through customs and norms that can take generations to develop. The U.S. financial system has had hundreds of years to build up trust, but people in a developing country with relatively new and/or weak legal institutions may be less likely to trust a new bank.
Why would we want to claim ownership of an instance of a digital image in the first place? Because, increasingly, we live in the digital world. Many of our interactions with other people already happen online. As more of our social lives become digitized, perhaps in the coming metaverse, people will spend more and more money expressing themselves online—just as they do in the offline world today.