You can't trust people. Even supposedly-trustworthy people working for supposedly-trustworthy household-name financial institutions like Barclays. What then can we trust? Technologies like BitCoin are predecated on the idea that we can trust mathematics and peer-reviewed logic. Are these mechanisms inherently more trustworthy than individual humans and human institutions? If this is truly the case, then the argument for financial intermediation to be founded on a similar technological basis is an exceptionally strong one. Anybody else interested in following this rabbit hole to see where it leads?