Absolutely, but how do you get it across to a large enough cohort of people so that a web of trust that isn't just a toy for geeks actually comes into being?

For many centuries, humanity has sought gold, struggling, toiling, polluting for gold, a metal that has only recently found practical applications, which are still far from the quantities extracted and simply stored away. This is to say that most people exhibit irrational behaviors, driven by emotions rather than logical reasoning, and some govern humanity by observing these irrational behaviors and cultivating them to make the largest possible cohort of humans do roughly what they want.

In this scenario, how can technologies that have rational foundations, but that don't stir emotion, succeed? It's a well-known Schopenhauerian theme: the tendency of the majority to believe in authority rather than think critically. A web of trust implies the opposite.