Trust Math, Not People

The Dangerous Illusion of Trustless Systems

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

This is, after all, a philosophy blog.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And over the past few years, I've watched with growing concern as more and more of my friends in the Bitcoin space have embraced a troubling mantra—“Trust math, not people.” It appears on social media bios, conference slides, and LinkedIn profiles. It's dropped casually in conversations about governance, economics, even politics. I've tried to intervene with some of these friends, to challenge the underlying assumptions of this slogan, but the phrase has become something of a sacred text among Bitcoin enthusiasts, a shorthand for the entire philosophical framework that underpins their technological vision.

And that's precisely what worries me. Because this isn't just a catchy phrase or a technical preference. It represents a profound philosophical error with moral implications that extend far beyond cryptocurrency.

Math is not a judge. Math is not a soul. Math cannot bring you home, nor hold the center when power comes for the tent. In the quest for certainty, for immutability, for freedom from human fallibility, Bitcoin maximalists have embraced a creed that licenses the abdication of agency, responsibility, and meaning. It's a siren song for those longing for certainty, but it's hollow at its core.

Bitcoin's cryptographic foundations are indeed elegant and fascinating. The mathematics of hash functions, public key cryptography, and distributed consensus protocols represent genuine innovations. But math, for all its precision, is fundamentally indifferent. It cannot protest when marshaled to serve harm. It cannot say, “This is injustice.” Only people, in relationship with each other, can do that.

Math will process a ransom payment, fund a war machine, or facilitate enslavement with the same dispassion as it calculates a fair wage. The blockchain records all transactions with equal validity—it has no conception of right or wrong, of pain or flourishing. When someone tells you to “trust math, not people,” they're asking you to place your faith in a system that cannot, by design, care about what happens to you or anyone else.

The blockchain doesn't care if your transaction represents food for your family or weapons for a cartel. It doesn't care if your NFT was stolen by fraud or legitimately purchased. The math simply executes. It is pure structure without purpose—and purpose is precisely what makes human life meaningful.

Kurt Gödel demonstrated that even mathematics isn't fully master of its own house. His incompleteness theorems proved that in any formal system complex enough to express basic arithmetic, there will always be true statements that cannot be proven within that system. There will always be limits to what “trusting math” can deliver, even on math's own terms.

David Hume's is-ought distinction lays the ax at the root of this cultish reductionism: you can never derive what you should do, or who you should trust, from a ledger or a hash function. The blockchain can tell you with certainty that an address controls certain assets. It cannot tell you whether those assets were acquired justly, whether they should be taxed or redistributed, whether their use serves human flourishing.

Math is a hammer; meaning lives in the hand that swings it. When Bitcoin maximalists declare “math doesn't care about your feelings,” they're not just being edgy—they're celebrating the very feature that makes math an insufficient foundation for human society. We need systems that do care about feelings, about suffering, about justice.

Bitcoin is not merely a tool. It embodies design choices that prefigure political arrangements and social contracts. The decision to cap the supply at 21 million coins, to reward miners through a specific mechanism, to prioritize certain types of transactions—these aren't mathematical necessities but choices made by people, encoding particular values and visions of society.

To trust Bitcoin more than human beings—and to trust its “mathiness” as inherent virtue—is to imagine that a tool can replace the messy, fallible, healing, tragic, and ultimately redemptive labor of human judgment. Democracy was never about trusting people because they are always right—it's the recognition that no tool exists that can save us from the necessity of trust.

When we install “immutable code” as sovereign, we simply replace one kind of partiality for another, but with less recourse and less care. Code cannot be petitioned, cannot feel shame, cannot be moved by suffering, cannot recognize its own errors, cannot forgive.

My philosophical project, The Grand Praxis, argues that meaning emerges from the creative tension between order and chaos, between certainty and possibility. “Trust math, not people” collapses this tension, sacrificing the very space where human meaning lives.

“Trust math, not people” represents the ultimate engineer's cop-out. It's not the dispassionate advance of enlightenment, but a deliberate retreat from the field of moral complexity. It imagines that systems can substitute for virtue, that protocols can eliminate the tragic dimension, that risk and trust and error can somehow be erased rather than always needing to be held, managed, forgiven, sometimes endured.

There's a reason why the most vocal advocates for “trustless” systems are often those most skeptical of democratic governance, of regulation, of collective action through politics. The ideology doesn't just reflect technological preferences; it represents a profound political abdication—a desire to escape the hard work of building just institutions by retreating into algorithmic certainty.

This retreat isn't neutral. It benefits those who already hold power and resources, who can leverage new systems to extend their advantages while disclaiming responsibility through appeals to mathematical inevitability. “Don't blame me—the math made me do it” becomes the ultimate defense against moral accountability.

Once the “trust math, not people” slogan takes hold, anything can be justified: if it's just “math,” there's no need to debate what's just or good—tyranny, extortion, and injustice become faceless line items in the blockchain. It evacuates the possibility of moral protest from the outset: “the protocol is the protocol.”

This is the dangerous core of contentless universalism—a fixation on method that abandons the question of ends. It's not about what the system does, but simply that it does it with mathematical certainty. This isn't progress; it's moral regression disguised as technological advancement.

When Bitcoin maximalists celebrate the system's indifference to human concerns as a feature rather than a bug, they reveal the anti-human heart of their philosophy. They're not just advocating for a new financial tool; they're promoting a worldview where human judgment, compassion, and moral agency are seen as weaknesses to be engineered away.

Here's the ultimate irony: technological systems that claim to eliminate trust in people are always secretly selling someone else's trust. They may make trust less visible or less human, but they cannot abolish it.

Bitcoin still requires trust in the developers who write and maintain the code, in the community that could execute a 51% attack, in the miners who confirm transactions, in the exchanges where most people buy and sell, and in the social consensus that gives the tokens value. What appears as “trustless” is actually just trust laundered through technology, obscured but not eliminated. The system doesn't remove the need for trust; it relocates it, often in ways that make accountability harder rather than easier.

What we need is not trustless systems, but worthier partners in trust—and the vigilance to hold them accountable. We need systems that acknowledge the necessity of human judgment rather than pretending to transcend it.

“Trust math, not people” is a creed for those who want out of the human project—and there is no exit from the human project. We cannot escape the necessity of trust, of judgment, of moral agency. We can only choose to exercise these capacities well or poorly, consciously or unconsciously.

The mathematical certainty promised by cryptographic systems is real within its domain, but that domain is far narrower than its advocates claim. Math can verify that a specific digital signature corresponds to a specific private key. It cannot tell us what that signature should mean in human terms, what values our systems should serve, how we should respond when technical systems intersect with human needs.

You cannot live in math. You can only live among people. Trust is a wager, not an equation. The task is not to escape it, but to make it worthy of us.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the center must be held—not because people are perfect, but because only people can care whether it is held at all.