When people don't trust their government, one of the best tools they have is to trust each other. If you trust neither your government nor your peers, then your battle is going to be all that much harder.
Being able to choose who to trust, and having tools to help you do that as efficiently and as minimally as possible, is almost as much of a superpower as not having to trust at all.
Some types of trust can be privacy-preserving. Some types of trust can be spread out over different groups of trust, so that the burden does not rest too heavily on any one person or group. Thanks to cryptography, we can break down trust to its smallest possible components, and assign them as deliberately and as minimally as we want, and to whom we want.
Anyway, on a completely unrelated note, have I mentioned how much I like Chaumian ecash?
