Primarily written for my own benefit, but hopefully helpful to someone else as well. Here I try to make them stick in to your mind (and maybe mine) by explaining them in the simplest way possible. Contributions are always welcome.
Let's start this explanation talking about something crucial for our lives: the kilogram. Bear with me! It will make sense in a minute.
The kilogram is the base unit of mass, meaning that everything related to weighting will be measured upon it. This unit makes possible that people to define amounts of something without misunderstandings, once the kilogram is a common language for this purpose. So, when you order 3kg of bananas, you know exactly what you are asking for and simply trust in the seller.
But there is a problem here. For many years, the kilogram has actually been a physical object, the "Le Grand K". Meaning kilogram has a centralized "entity", which dictates the value of it. Got the issue already? What guarantee that 1kg is, in fact, 1kg? If the object that represents the kilogram changes over time, the kilogram is no longer a kilogram, because the object is the kilogram itself. Getting it?
For that reason, researchers started to work on a way to transform the kilogram into a concept (i.e. Avogadro project) instead of a object working as a centralized "entity".
Entities can be corrupted. Concepts cannot!
With that been said, the next question is: what is the base unit for business? There anwser is TRUST!
I trust everyone. It's the devil inside the person I don't trust. (The italian job)
As simple as it sounds, trust is the biggest gap when it comes to make business. Think about it: why do we sign contracts? Shouldn't "I give you my word" be enogh? Another example: why do we have banks? Why do we need a centralized institution saying how much cash each one of us has available?
"Here, take this $50.000,00 dollars loan. Give me your word that you will pay me back and we are good." said no bank ever.
At the moment we were forced to create institutions to centralize trust, it became a physical object, tangible, passive to be corrupted, manipulated and hacked.
Shouldn't trust be decentralized among the parties and become a concept?
Let's see a real-world example:
Think about your family. Think about all moments that you've been shared. At some point, your coolest uncle asks if you remember that trip to planet Mars. "It was awesome, wasn't it?" he asks. You, confused, start to ask yourself if this trip has happened ever. You ask to your mom, your dad, your brother, sister, cousin. None of them has any knowledge about this memory. Since all your relatives share same memories than you, you choose to trust in the majority instead of your uncle alone.
See, you and your family have been implementing distributed trust before it was cool.
Comming soon.
YOU CAN FIND THE LATEST (YET IN PROGRESS) TEXT ON DEV BRANCH.