> Imagine you didn't need to trust a stranger to make a deal with them.

You mean, if I could deal with a specific stranger by trusting a much much larger group of strangers to ensure fairness for the individual case?

... Starts sounding like a government that enforces contracts, so that's not entirely new :)

> The second category are the profiteers who trying to make a quick buck off the unaware and the optimistic. Unfortunately, this second category is getting most of the attention.

True, it's the nano-socialnetwork-gene-plasatics du jour in some circles.

> Starts sounding like a government that enforces contracts, so that's not entirely new :)

The difference is that you can cryptographically verify the correctness of the enforced contract. You don't "Trust", you "Trust, but verify".