Impact of Blockchain Applications on Trust in Business

Blockchain applications are considered as\r\n“trustless” machines, because they reduce business’s needs of trust in others.\r\nThe “trustless” nature draws researchers’ attention on investigating the\r\nimplications of blockchain in a business environment. From a view of business\r\nethics, this paper aims at evaluating the impacts of blockchain applications on\r\ntrust and business. After expounding the relations between trust in blockchain\r\nand trust in business partners, I evaluate the impacts based on a framework of\r\ncompetence trust, contractual trust, and goodwill trust. My conclusion is that\r\nfull acceptance of trust in blockchain over trust in others is not good and\r\nwill cause several risks that cannot be neglected. The main contribution of\r\nthis paper is investigating and summarizing ethical and commercial risks of\r\nblockchain applications including disintermediation fallacy, centralization of\r\ntrust, ambiguous contract, noncognitive trust in untrustworthy partners, and\r\nmore actions guided by moral minimum.