Sam Armstrong
1 min readMar 2, 2018

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I’m not conflating. Security is an umbrella which contains trust (or lack there of), privacy, and decentralization. The utility of those 3 things is ultimately to prevent some sort of loss caused by an attacker. Privacy could be about not revealing trade secrets or deals that could give a competitor an advantage, or not exposing yourself to governments attention and confiscation. These things are about security. Rate of decay. See what I’m getting at? Trustlessness and decentralization both serve the similar purposes. They’re defensive against fraud or theft. Security. Usability is about ease of use, taking advantage of opportunities. Gain so to speak. One might say that security and usability are really about the tension between gain and loss. One side is prioritizing protection, the other is advancement. Both are necessary, but we need to recognize that one is usually at the cost of the other, and how to determine which added unit of security or usability is more valuable.

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