Nutrition Labels for Trust

The man in the painting at the top of this page is doing the oldest verification job there is. He is weighing each coin on a balance, one at a time, because the face stamped on a coin is a claim and its weight is the evidence, and a money changer who confused the two went broke. He does not trust the mint. He trusts the scale. Five hundred years later, almost all of our software asks us to trust…