What Remains Open

The deepest open question about the trust layer concerns the relationship between trust and power. In every social system in which trust is a significant resource, the distribution of trust is correlated with prior distributions of power. People who have access to well-established networks, prestigious institutional affiliations, and documented histories of consequential participation will generate trust signals more easily than people who lack those advantages — not necessarily because they are more trustworthy, but because their trustworthiness has been more legibly documented in forms that the trust layer can recognize. A trust layer that reproduces existing power distributions under the label of merit is not a constitutional innovation. It is an existing hierarchy with a new verification mechanism. How the trust layer is designed to resist this reproduction — while still performing the function of distinguishing genuine trustworthiness from its simulation — is a question for which the intellectual traditions engaged in this chapter do not provide a fully satisfying answer.