ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on issues to do with how we understand the question of trust and its relationship to commerce and supply chains in particular. It draws on the phenomenological traditions to argue that blockchains are not about trust at all but, rather, can better be understood in terms of information dependability. Trust qua trust is more meaningfully understood as interpersonal dynamics involving give and take. Human beings do not have trusting relations with machines (including computer databases). Ideas of common knowledge and its derivatives are introduced as tropes to better elucidate the role of information symmetry in the context of economic systems involving exchanges between strangers, separated by space and time.
