From biological trust mechanisms (trust) to technological ones ("trustless")
The blockchain is often said to be "trustless", and what that means is that the blockchain itself is made possible by a separate technology, which could replace how transactions how been verified in the past, the one-way function.
It is the hypothesis of asymmetry in algorithmic information, and that there are one-way functions, which then as a "technological trust mechanism" could scale without the limitations that "biological trust mechanisms" have (dunbar's number).
The 20th century and the primordial soup of "technology trust mechanisms"
In his 1874 book The Principles of Science, William Stanley Jevons wrote:
Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number 8616460799?[8] I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know.
And some 80 years later, in the 1950s and the early days of the computer age, John Nash and Kurt Gödel and that generation were developing on the idea of one-way functions.
Could "trustless" verification lead to similar leaps as trust did originally ?
So, "technological trust mechanisms" are then "trustless" as they have no similarities with "biological trust mechanisms" which are limited by dunbar's number. Since the advent of memetic evolution some 3 million years ago, the ability to ideate new beliefs, and to spread them, and mix them, has co-evolved with biological trust mechanisms, and those mechanisms have scalability limitations, based on limits in theory of mind and facial cognition etc.
In that sense, there is a sort of trust mechanism when running on one-way functions, tough it has very few similarities with the biological trust mechanisms that have been used so far, and I would say the leap that could come from using trustless organization (of course, trust would be used for dApps and governance services on top of the trustless state) is similar to that which came from using trust to co-ordinate the evolution of memes and technology to begin with.
The one-way function hypothesis
The one-way function is a hypothesis, and so at least how I understand it, whether or not trustless organization using one-way functions will actually work is not known. Moshe Y. Vardi said in 2002 that
The main argument in favor of P ≠ NP is the total lack of fundamental progress in the area of exhaustive search. This is, in my opinion, a very weak argument. The space of algorithms is very large and we are only at the beginning of its exploration.
The existence of them will make it possible to scale society without the limitations that come with biological trust mechanisms.