Trust-Minimized Scaling
= "Solve every problem, at every scale, with the minimal mutual trust required among participants for success." [1]
Context
Venkatesh Rao:
1.
"Early in the crypto story, circa 2009-13, there was a lot of talk of trustless architectures, but there has since been a growing appreciation that that’s too strong a term, and not even imaginable in principle, let alone practice. So phrases like “trust-minimizing” and “sufficiently decentralized” are the staples of crypto discourse in 2025. But though the views have gotten more nuanced, the fundamental tendency is still towards designing for a default assumption of not just low trust, but active distrust."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/beyond-szabo-scaling)
2.
"I propose societal expressivity as the right quantity to try and maximize. Loosely, for every problem at every level, build the most capable global computer (human + machines) we reasonably can, leaving a lot of surplus expressivity and power to work with. ... Expressivity maximization has in fact been the historical story of social scaling, and the source of a great deal of thriving. Because the volume of things that actually get expressed seems to be a function of the expressivity of the system in principle, and the possibilities only become obvious once the system is actually available."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/beyond-szabo-scaling)
Definition
Venkatesh Rao:
"Trust-minimized scaling can be described as the following strategy: Solve every problem, at every scale, with the minimal mutual trust required among participants for success."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/beyond-szabo-scaling)
Discussion
Social Scalability according to Nick Szabo
Venkatesh Rao:
"Today, 16 years after the invention of Bitcoin, the crypto world is guardedly exploring a range of positions on the spectrum between trust-minimizing and more expressive social scaling architectures. Ethereum occupies something of a middling position. Solana explores greater expressivity, not by increasing computational leverage (you can’t do much more after going Turing-complete) but by loosening the sociopolitical architecture constraints around the blockchain (around where physical computers validating the blockchain can live for example).
Most recently, the booming world of stablecoins loosens constraints around social trust minimization even further. To use a stablecoin, you must bring back the dreaded nemesis of Szabo, the “trusted third party,” in the form of entities like the US government (for dollar-pegged stablecoins) or Stripe (the corporation behind the new Tempo blockchain, no relation). As more state-sponsored stablecoins (so-called central-bank digital currencies, CBDCs) come online, the picture will only get more complex.
While all this fleshing out of the positions on the spectrum is good, and I’m glad the blockchain world (and the adjacent architectural spaces that use many of the building blocks of blockchains without being blockchains) is going beyond trust-minimizing scaling, the larger problem is seeing everything through the lens of trust (and therefore, blockchain-like or blockchain-adjacent infrastructures), even if you don’t seek to minimize trust.
Social scalability is about more than trust-experience engineering.
The focus on trust minimization (which, to repeat, is an important consideration, but far from the only consideration or even the most important consideration in every case) in what I’ll call Szabo scaling reflects a fundamentally pessimistic view of human sociality itself."
(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/beyond-szabo-scaling)