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Re-Architecting Trust: The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets, and Platforms
Trust is the most important thing that we hardly ever think about. Until it's not there. Then it becomes the only thing we think about. Without it our civil society unravels. Trust allows different kinds of people from anywhere to interact with each other. If we all trust the same money, then we can do business together. When we trust a financial system, we can save, borrow, invest, and send and receive money smoothly. Trustworthy online platforms expand our world through marketplaces, social interactions, gig workers, and more.
Throughout history the belief in trust has been codified by rules, regulations, and laws. The challenge with trust, though, is that it eventually becomes corroded – through malice, greed, and, quite often, apathy. History is littered with the carcasses of once trusty solutions that fell by the wayside.
Today, trust in the most basic and important functions – money, markets, and platforms – is at an all-time low. Currencies are rife with inflation, financial firms require ever bigger bailouts, social media algorithms radicalize our friends, and politicians sell out to special interests. We can point blame in many directions, make more rules to combat the ills, but it will fail – just as such efforts have failed throughout history.
Technology has long played an important role both in the evolution of trust and its undoing, especially during periods of historic change, like now. Much of the technology that we dependend on is breaking bad due to misaligned incentives and poor design. But thankfully a newer, more sophisticated, technology can be used to restore trust in our most important interactions and return power and profits back to the people that money, markets, and platforms were meant to serve without censorship or surveillance.
Re-Architecting Trust is a thought-provoking exploration of how decentralized blockchain networks and the digital assets that they enable can reinvent our most important trust frameworks by creating new types of money, reinvigorating how we transact the old kind, disintermediating the least trustworthy financial institutions, and enabling meaningful business models for artists and influencers. Omid Malekan, who has studied cryptocurrencies and blockchain for almost a decade, explains how the mishmash of technologies that enable Bitcoin can be applied to everything that matters to level the playing field, preserve your purchasing power, expand everyone's access to financial services, enable brand new business models and elevate new communities in an ever fracturing society.
Known as the Explainer-in-Chief of crypto, Malekan has a unique ability to make complicated topics accessible to anyone. In Re-Architecting Trust he provides the reader with a guided tour of how money, markets, and platforms have evolved, where things have gone off the rails, and how we can restore integrity. No pie-in-the-sky fantasy, Malekan paints a compelling picture of where we are headed and how you can be a part of it.
Throughout history the belief in trust has been codified by rules, regulations, and laws. The challenge with trust, though, is that it eventually becomes corroded – through malice, greed, and, quite often, apathy. History is littered with the carcasses of once trusty solutions that fell by the wayside.
Today, trust in the most basic and important functions – money, markets, and platforms – is at an all-time low. Currencies are rife with inflation, financial firms require ever bigger bailouts, social media algorithms radicalize our friends, and politicians sell out to special interests. We can point blame in many directions, make more rules to combat the ills, but it will fail – just as such efforts have failed throughout history.
Technology has long played an important role both in the evolution of trust and its undoing, especially during periods of historic change, like now. Much of the technology that we dependend on is breaking bad due to misaligned incentives and poor design. But thankfully a newer, more sophisticated, technology can be used to restore trust in our most important interactions and return power and profits back to the people that money, markets, and platforms were meant to serve without censorship or surveillance.
Re-Architecting Trust is a thought-provoking exploration of how decentralized blockchain networks and the digital assets that they enable can reinvent our most important trust frameworks by creating new types of money, reinvigorating how we transact the old kind, disintermediating the least trustworthy financial institutions, and enabling meaningful business models for artists and influencers. Omid Malekan, who has studied cryptocurrencies and blockchain for almost a decade, explains how the mishmash of technologies that enable Bitcoin can be applied to everything that matters to level the playing field, preserve your purchasing power, expand everyone's access to financial services, enable brand new business models and elevate new communities in an ever fracturing society.
Known as the Explainer-in-Chief of crypto, Malekan has a unique ability to make complicated topics accessible to anyone. In Re-Architecting Trust he provides the reader with a guided tour of how money, markets, and platforms have evolved, where things have gone off the rails, and how we can restore integrity. No pie-in-the-sky fantasy, Malekan paints a compelling picture of where we are headed and how you can be a part of it.
- GenresEconomicsTechnology
336 pages, Hardcover
Published July 6, 2022
24 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 6, 2026
The least interesting question about Bitcoin is whether you should buy it. The more interesting question is why so many people stopped trusting the systems that came before it. That is the question Omid Malekan is really asking in Re-Architecting Trust.
I had taken a class with Omid when reading the book, so I did not come to it as a completely neutral reader. I already knew the way he thinks: he starts with the thing everyone is arguing about, then zooms out until the argument becomes bigger and more interesting. In class, that made crypto feel less like a niche technology and more like a way to study money, power, institutions, and human behavior. Reading the book felt like entering that same conversation again, but in a more complete form.
What makes Re-Architecting Trust work is that it is not really a book about why crypto is good. It is a book about why trust is hard. Crypto is the subject on the surface, but trust is the real subject underneath. Who do we trust? Why do we trust them? What happens when they abuse that trust? And can we design systems where trust does not have to be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful intermediaries?
One of the ideas that stayed with me most is that there is no single answer to the question, “What is Bitcoin?” Bitcoin can be a currency, an investment asset, a payment system, a digital platform, a decentralized protocol, and a global community all at once. That explains why people talk past each other so often when they talk about it. One person is criticizing it as a bad currency. Another person is defending it as a store of value. Someone else sees it as a political movement. They may all be talking about the same thing, but they are not really having the same conversation.
That is one of the strengths of the book: it gives language to confusion. Instead of treating crypto as one simple thing, Malekan shows why it is difficult to define. That does not make crypto automatically good, but it does make it more interesting.
The most powerful idea in the book, for me, was the paradox of trust. Trust makes us vulnerable. To trust someone means accepting that they could disappoint us, cheat us, or use our dependence against us. Individually, that vulnerability can make us weak. But collectively, trust is what makes us strong. It is the reason people can cooperate beyond their families, tribes, or immediate communities. Without trust, there are no markets, no banks, no platforms, no governments, and no large-scale society.
That paradox is what makes trust so dangerous and so necessary at the same time.
Traditionally, societies have dealt with this problem through hierarchies. We trust someone above us, and that person is supposed to be accountable to someone above them. A hierarchy creates order by giving people a place to put their faith. But hierarchies also create temptation. The people at the top can free ride. They can become corrupt. They can use the trust placed in them for their own benefit. The structure that solves one trust problem creates another one.
This is where the book’s argument for decentralization becomes more serious. Decentralization is not presented as only a tech platform. In fact, one of the things I appreciated is that Malekan admits decentralized platforms are usually less efficient than centralized ones. Reaching consensus is hard. Letting one company make decisions is obviously faster than asking a network to agree.
But efficiency is not the only thing that matters. A centralized platform can be smooth and convenient while still exploiting its users. The users create the value, but the owners often capture it. That is especially true in the age of network effects. One of the lines that stood out to me was the idea that yesterday’s antitrust laws are not effective in the era of network effects. Older laws were not built for platforms whose power comes from the fact that everyone is already there. The more people use a platform, the harder it becomes to leave. That kind of power is not always obvious through price, but it shapes people’s lives anyway.
This made me think differently about platforms. A platform does not have to look abusive to be powerful. It can be useful, even addictive, while still controlling the rules, the data, the money, and the upside.
Blockchain offers a different model because, at least in theory, users can also be owners. A blockchain platform cannot exploit its users for the benefit of some separate group of owners in the same way, because the users and owners can overlap. I do not think this solves everything. Ownership can still become concentrated. Crypto can still reproduce the same inequalities it claims to fight. But the idea is important because it changes the question from “How do users use the platform?” to “Who owns the platform users are helping to build?”
The parts about central banks also made the book feel bigger than crypto. Malekan describes how central banks once focused mainly on price stability and keeping trust in money high. But over time, their mission expanded. They used to worry about prices rising too fast; now they also worry about prices falling. That shift may sound technical, but it has real consequences. Policies that support asset prices often benefit people who already own assets. So a system designed to maintain stability can also increase wealth inequality.
That was one of the moments where the book felt most useful to me. It made monetary policy feel less abstract. Money is not neutral. The rules around money decide who benefits from stability, who pays for crisis, and whose trust the system is really trying to preserve.
What I appreciated most about Re-Architecting Trust is that it does not ask the reader to worship crypto. It asks the reader to take the problems seriously. A weaker book would have tried to convince me that blockchain fixes everything. This book is more convincing because it starts somewhere else. It starts with the failures of the systems we already live inside.
I do not agree with every implication of the crypto worldview. Decentralized systems can be inefficient, confusing, speculative, and unequal. Security may be the foundation of trust in a decentralized platform, but most ordinary users are not actually able to evaluate that security themselves. So even in systems designed to reduce trust in intermediaries, new forms of trust appear. People trust developers, exchanges, influencers, wallets, communities, and narratives. Trust does not disappear. It moves.
But that is also why the book is worth reading. It makes you notice where trust is hiding.
For me, the book was strongest when it made crypto feel like a response to institutional failure rather than a trend. It helped me understand why people might look at banks, central banks, tech platforms, and governments and want something built differently. Not necessarily something perfect. Just something where the rules are more visible, the power is less concentrated, and the users are not only users.
Reading the book after taking Omid’s class made the experience more personal. I could hear the same intellectual style: skeptical of easy answers, interested in history, and always trying to connect technology back to human incentives.
I had taken a class with Omid when reading the book, so I did not come to it as a completely neutral reader. I already knew the way he thinks: he starts with the thing everyone is arguing about, then zooms out until the argument becomes bigger and more interesting. In class, that made crypto feel less like a niche technology and more like a way to study money, power, institutions, and human behavior. Reading the book felt like entering that same conversation again, but in a more complete form.
What makes Re-Architecting Trust work is that it is not really a book about why crypto is good. It is a book about why trust is hard. Crypto is the subject on the surface, but trust is the real subject underneath. Who do we trust? Why do we trust them? What happens when they abuse that trust? And can we design systems where trust does not have to be concentrated in the hands of a few powerful intermediaries?
One of the ideas that stayed with me most is that there is no single answer to the question, “What is Bitcoin?” Bitcoin can be a currency, an investment asset, a payment system, a digital platform, a decentralized protocol, and a global community all at once. That explains why people talk past each other so often when they talk about it. One person is criticizing it as a bad currency. Another person is defending it as a store of value. Someone else sees it as a political movement. They may all be talking about the same thing, but they are not really having the same conversation.
That is one of the strengths of the book: it gives language to confusion. Instead of treating crypto as one simple thing, Malekan shows why it is difficult to define. That does not make crypto automatically good, but it does make it more interesting.
The most powerful idea in the book, for me, was the paradox of trust. Trust makes us vulnerable. To trust someone means accepting that they could disappoint us, cheat us, or use our dependence against us. Individually, that vulnerability can make us weak. But collectively, trust is what makes us strong. It is the reason people can cooperate beyond their families, tribes, or immediate communities. Without trust, there are no markets, no banks, no platforms, no governments, and no large-scale society.
That paradox is what makes trust so dangerous and so necessary at the same time.
Traditionally, societies have dealt with this problem through hierarchies. We trust someone above us, and that person is supposed to be accountable to someone above them. A hierarchy creates order by giving people a place to put their faith. But hierarchies also create temptation. The people at the top can free ride. They can become corrupt. They can use the trust placed in them for their own benefit. The structure that solves one trust problem creates another one.
This is where the book’s argument for decentralization becomes more serious. Decentralization is not presented as only a tech platform. In fact, one of the things I appreciated is that Malekan admits decentralized platforms are usually less efficient than centralized ones. Reaching consensus is hard. Letting one company make decisions is obviously faster than asking a network to agree.
But efficiency is not the only thing that matters. A centralized platform can be smooth and convenient while still exploiting its users. The users create the value, but the owners often capture it. That is especially true in the age of network effects. One of the lines that stood out to me was the idea that yesterday’s antitrust laws are not effective in the era of network effects. Older laws were not built for platforms whose power comes from the fact that everyone is already there. The more people use a platform, the harder it becomes to leave. That kind of power is not always obvious through price, but it shapes people’s lives anyway.
This made me think differently about platforms. A platform does not have to look abusive to be powerful. It can be useful, even addictive, while still controlling the rules, the data, the money, and the upside.
Blockchain offers a different model because, at least in theory, users can also be owners. A blockchain platform cannot exploit its users for the benefit of some separate group of owners in the same way, because the users and owners can overlap. I do not think this solves everything. Ownership can still become concentrated. Crypto can still reproduce the same inequalities it claims to fight. But the idea is important because it changes the question from “How do users use the platform?” to “Who owns the platform users are helping to build?”
The parts about central banks also made the book feel bigger than crypto. Malekan describes how central banks once focused mainly on price stability and keeping trust in money high. But over time, their mission expanded. They used to worry about prices rising too fast; now they also worry about prices falling. That shift may sound technical, but it has real consequences. Policies that support asset prices often benefit people who already own assets. So a system designed to maintain stability can also increase wealth inequality.
That was one of the moments where the book felt most useful to me. It made monetary policy feel less abstract. Money is not neutral. The rules around money decide who benefits from stability, who pays for crisis, and whose trust the system is really trying to preserve.
What I appreciated most about Re-Architecting Trust is that it does not ask the reader to worship crypto. It asks the reader to take the problems seriously. A weaker book would have tried to convince me that blockchain fixes everything. This book is more convincing because it starts somewhere else. It starts with the failures of the systems we already live inside.
I do not agree with every implication of the crypto worldview. Decentralized systems can be inefficient, confusing, speculative, and unequal. Security may be the foundation of trust in a decentralized platform, but most ordinary users are not actually able to evaluate that security themselves. So even in systems designed to reduce trust in intermediaries, new forms of trust appear. People trust developers, exchanges, influencers, wallets, communities, and narratives. Trust does not disappear. It moves.
But that is also why the book is worth reading. It makes you notice where trust is hiding.
For me, the book was strongest when it made crypto feel like a response to institutional failure rather than a trend. It helped me understand why people might look at banks, central banks, tech platforms, and governments and want something built differently. Not necessarily something perfect. Just something where the rules are more visible, the power is less concentrated, and the users are not only users.
Reading the book after taking Omid’s class made the experience more personal. I could hear the same intellectual style: skeptical of easy answers, interested in history, and always trying to connect technology back to human incentives.
April 12, 2026
Dropped
January 29, 2023
"Why do people say please and thank you? It helps communicate the desire to build trust." and "Respect is a 2nd derivative of trust." Recommended (assigned) reading after perhaps too many questions about blockchains and cryptocurrency, I found this book just the right mix of story telling, education and commentary.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews