In its 2020 survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified a paradox: ‘despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures – government, business, NGOs and media – is trusted’.1 This is a rather grim sounding paradox. One can try to resolve it in a variety of ways. An obvious way would be to argue that when we measure trust, we are measuring a rather uninformative quantity. After all, trust can be considered good and a loss of trust would accordingly be bad only if and insofar as trust is placed in something or someone actually worthy of our trust. So, the true problem, one could argue, is not the loss of trust but the loss of trustworthiness – and this has not been measured.2 Whether trust is a good proxy for trustworthiness has yet to be established.

This chapter seeks to discredit the popular belief that blockchains will revolutionize or disrupt commerce. More specifically, it aims to clarify that blockchains as such cannot serve as a technology or ideology for the decentralization of online marketplaces. To this end, the chapter examines the interrelated concepts of decentralization, disintermediation, trustlessness, and immutability. It is necessary to understand what those terms actually mean and how they affect actual, commercial practices. The chapter commences with a broad description of blockchains and introduces the important division between public and private blockchains, to demonstrate that only the latter could potentially serve as a technology that could provide a user-friendly and secure transacting environment. It confronts the practical implications of decentralization, focusing on the fact that the absence of formalized control usually translates into an absence of formalized governance processes.