This is an opinion editorial by Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, educator and entrepreneur and programmer with over 20 years of experience.
Nobody wants to do the hard work of verification.
Instead most people want to just trust somebody and not worry about seeking out the truth. I get it, verification is hard. Verification is time consuming, it requires effort and taxes your brain. This is because the truth does not give itself up easily, especially when obscured by the people that want to get away with something. The critical thinking, research skills and analytical ability required are not easy to obtain, either.
Unfortunately, the fewer people who verify, the more trusted third-parties become a problem. This is not just true in bitcoin custody, as we're all too familiar with in the light of 3 Arrows Capital, Voyager and BlockFi, but in all sorts of other fields. The metaphorical cookie jar is very tempting for the trusted third-parties.
Fiat Knowledge
There are two kinds of knowledge. The kind that you have verified yourself — this bed is comfortable — and the kind that you are told (unless you're an experimental physicist, E=mc2). The kind that we've verified ourselves should be the one that we're more willing to stick our necks out for, but sadly, this is not the case.
Conventional wisdom, political correctness and the general desire to fit in and not get made fun of hinder our willingness to "die on that hill." There are social pressures at play that throw verified knowledge out the window.
There's a famous experiment in psychology which demonstrates this effect called the Solomon-Ash Conformity Experiment[1]. The participants were tested on whether they would give the answer that was obviously true or the false answer that would conform to the
