TITLE:
Impact of Blockchain Applications on Trust in Business
AUTHORS:
Siming He
KEYWORDS:
Trust, Blockchain, Data, Contract, Goodwill, Competence
JOURNAL NAME:
iBusiness,
Vol.12 No.3,
September
28,
2020
ABSTRACT: Blockchain applications are considered as
“trustless” machines, because they reduce business’s needs of trust in others.
The “trustless” nature draws researchers’ attention on investigating the
implications of blockchain in a business environment. From a view of business
ethics, this paper aims at evaluating the impacts of blockchain applications on
trust and business. After expounding the relations between trust in blockchain
and trust in business partners, I evaluate the impacts based on a framework of
competence trust, contractual trust, and goodwill trust. My conclusion is that
full acceptance of trust in blockchain over trust in others is not good and
will cause several risks that cannot be neglected. The main contribution of
this paper is investigating and summarizing ethical and commercial risks of
blockchain applications including disintermediation fallacy, centralization of
trust, ambiguous contract, noncognitive trust in untrustworthy partners, and
more actions guided by moral minimum.