Posted by Most people writing about blockchain treat it as a technical story. A new way to record transactions without a central authority. I get why that framing exists, but I think it misses the more interesting question, which is a sociological one. What does it mean for a society when trust, something historically built between people and institutions, starts getting built into code instead?
I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Trust is the concept I keep coming back to. Sociologists have argued for a long time that trust rests on relationships, reputations, and shared institutions that give people confidence others will behave predictably (Polcumpally et al., 2024). Banks, courts, and government registries have played that role for centuries.
Blockchain proposes something different. Instead of trusting a person or an institution, you trust a mathematical process that anyone can verify. That is not a small shift. It relocates trust from social relationships to a technical system, and I think that move deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets.
So I will take a position here rather than sit on the fence. I do not think blockchain replaces social trust so much as it repackages it. A systematic review of blockchain governance research found that using blockchain technology effectively substitutes cognitive attribution of trust in institutions for trust in code that operates independently of human judgment (Polcumpally et al., 2024).
That sounds appealing on the surface, since code cannot play favorites or ask for a bribe. But code is written by people. It is maintained by people. It is governed by whichever group controls the majority of computing power or the loudest voice in a decentralized community. The trust has not disappeared. It has simply moved to a smaller, less visible group of developers and validators, and most users have no way to evaluate whether that group deserves the confidence being placed in it.
Does that sound familiar? It should, because it is not so different from trusting a bank. The difference is that with a bank, there is a regulator standing behind it and a customer service line to call when something goes wrong. With blockchain, you often have neither. This matters for society because trust has always been distributed unevenly, and blockchain does not automatically fix that.
People with technical literacy and financial resources can audit a blockchain system and participate in its governance. Everyone else is asked to trust the outcome without understanding the process. I have watched friends who barely understand how a wallet works get swept up in crypto hype, and I worry about what happens when that trust gets broken and there is no one to call. That is not progress. That is just a different set of gatekeepers.
Where I do think blockchain offers something genuinely new is in situations where existing institutions have already failed people. I am thinking particularly about record-keeping in places with weak governments or corrupt registries. A system that removes the need for institutional trust entirely can be valuable there, precisely because the alternative institutional trust never existed in the first place.
I have read accounts of land registries in countries where paperwork gets lost or falsified, and blockchain does offer a real alternative in those contexts. That is worth acknowledging. For most everyday uses in stable societies, though, I remain skeptical that blockchain represents progress rather than relocation. Sociology has spent decades studying how trust is built and maintained between people.
That work does not become obsolete just because a new technology claims to make trust unnecessary. If anything, it becomes more important, because someone needs to keep asking who actually controls the code. I do not have a tidy answer to that question. But I think sitting with it, rather than rushing past it, is the more honest response.
I suppose what bothers me most is how quickly we accept technological solutions to social problems. We see corruption in institutions and assume code will save us. We see banks failing communities and assume decentralization will fix it. But trust is not a technical problem. It is a human one. It is built through relationships, accountability, and shared values.
Blockchain can rearrange where trust lives, but it cannot answer the deeper question of who deserves it. That is something we still have to figure out together, and no algorithm will do that work for us. For anyone who wants to dig deeper into the sociological dimensions of blockchain and trust, this blockchain governance research is a solid place to start.
References
Polcumpally, A. T., Pandey, K. K., Kumar, A., & Samadhiya, A. (2024). Blockchain governance and trust: A multi-sector thematic systematic review and exploration of future research directions. Heliyon, 10(12), Article e32975. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11231554/
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2020). The tokenisation of assets and potential implications for financial markets. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/
Kopsaj, V. (2025). Blockchain e fiducia: La tecnologia che riscrive il sociale. The Lab’s Quarterly, 27(0). https://www.thelabs.sp.unipi.it/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TLQ-2025-Kopsaj-Blockchain-e-fiducia-la-tecnologia-che-riscrive-il-sociale.pdf