Following on the heels of the first article in this series Web 3 Mass Adoption Part 1: Transactional Contracts, let's think about some ways we can help keep people safe in Web 3.

Since I didn't receive any comments on my last article (though the thumbs up are much appreciated!), you get to hear more of my unadulterated views :)  So let's get to it!

In that previous article, I asked a few questions about how to modify an NFT receipt.
Do you just make more NFTs to account for additional aspects of a transaction (returns, mispricing, etc.)?
Can we modify the existing NFT?
The underlying question is how can we create a system that is flexible enough for humans to use it, but transactional enough that we can trust it?

This is one of those tradeoffs that we always hear Software Architects talk about.

The more flexible it becomes, the more centralized control there is over your crypto assets.

Great - now that we have that out of the way we can circle back to the issue of trust.
We've talked about how trust is needed in any human exchange to some degree.  It's also one of the points of weakness in most human transactions.
Blockchain can help us deal with the transactional aspects of trust, but not the immanence of the products we use.
So how do address this divide?

1. Make everything on-demand

   This is basically what you see in the start trek replicator.  You tell a blockchain contract you need a thing, and your handy replicator makes it for you.  It would be a pretty cool system if we were at that point of development, but alas it's currently beyond our reach.  Being able to create and dispose of anything at any time would deal with a bunch of our difficulties with blockchain (and most of the issues with our receipt example!).

2. Create great AI systems

  This is the idea of using emerging AI interpreters to address human requests via text, image or otherwise.  Give the AIs control of different functions and you get a perfect system, right?  Again, this is an emerging technology and maybe we'll be able to train some pretty sweet AIs to deal with most of our problems - but that's just switching out a human operator for a generated operator.  It doesn't really address the underlying issue of flexibility vs. centralized control (Though it does address an aspect of trust in centralized control).

3.  Smart Contract Admin Functions:

Before we get out the pitch forks and checking to see if someone weighs the same as a duck, let's define what we mean.
Let's call anything that can update, delete or can have an effect on a user's wallet without the user of the wallet authorizing the change.
Alright, now you can grab the pitchforks and weigh scales.
In order to improve the flexibility (here it can be thought of as a proxy for usability), we need to increase the number of controls on a subset of cryptocurrencies.  This, of course, leads to "not your crypto even with your keys" - at least for this subset of currencies.

It's not ideal, and frankly, not how I'd like to envision the future of money - but it may be a necessary (and perhaps intermittent) evil.

That being said, it's not the totality of web 3 that would need to act like this - most likely just the government issued token that we'll almost certainly have within the next few years (why use stablecoins, when you can get the government-insured token?).  Everything else can remain as it is.  The token for gas (e.g. ETH) on whichever chain shouldn't have this feature, not BTC, nor anything else that provides a store of value in and of itself.  I'm not advocating for the undermining of web 3 assets, but a recognition that most people won't want to buy a plethora of tokens for every different little thing.
What types of Admin functions might be needed?
The first that comes to mind is theft correction and reversion of assets.
Let's say that someone interacted with the wrong smart contract and it drained 1000 AdminFunction tokens from their wallet.
There's no way to undo that transaction, unfortunately, but given the right controls in the AdminFunction smart contract you could track the AdminFunction transaction(s) and trace the tokens through to their eventual destination.  In fact, you could even have functions that remove tokens from the thief's wallet and place them back into the victim's wallet.
That sounds like a good use case.  That sounds like it would even be an improvement over how our existing banking system works and tracks money - and you'd be right.
These tools are POWERFUL - and amoral.  Which also makes them dangerous.  The same tools which allow you to help the victim of a robbery are the same tools which could be used to perpetrate a robbery.  Maybe you forgot to write the contract bureaucrat a thank you note for restoring your life savings after a theft, and he decided to garnish an "administration fee" for all the trouble it took him.  Well, you can see that he took it - but you have no power (other than the transparency allowed by the blockchain - and public outrage) to do anything about it.
Which is where we run into the tradeoffs of these Admin Functions. 
Is it worth giving institutions centralized control over some aspect of our lives for protection?  That answer is going to change a lot from one person to the next.  At present, there's a historic low in institutional trust in North American institutions so there would likely be a number which object to this type of control.  But for many, the idea that their savings are protected & insured by corporations and institutions is essential for them to use any platform.
Since we're talking about mass adoption, and not the merits or demerits of how people approach life we need to consider the things that these types of people value, and how we can give them what they need to feel safe in a web 3 world.  But that in itself is a topic for another article.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way to keep people relatively safe in web 3 without some aspect of administrative trust.
But, what I think crypto can do is usher in an age of radical transparency for the administrative institutions which will bring enough scrutiny to keep them relatively even handed.  Perhaps crypto can create its own institutions based on radical decentralized trust and address not only transactional issues, but issues of trust more generally in society.  I'm mildly optimistic about this aspect of blockchain going forward, but I also know there are many pitfalls in our paths.

Let's keep our eyes open to avoiding these pitfalls, and try to think up other ways we can address this balance of flexibility vs centralized control.

And as always, don't forget to bring a duck. ;)

Leave me some comments if you agree or disagree.  Hit that thumbs up if you like the discussion and want to keep it going.