The Trust Tax: Why Every Scam Makes Honest Life More Expensive

Every online payment now comes with its own small tax: a few extra seconds spent proving you are who you say you are. Photo: Mikhail Nilov /pexels

Subtitle: A hidden, uncollected levy that everyone pays because a small minority of people can’t be trusted.

Log into your bank account today and you’ll hit a password, a one-time code, a device check, maybe a CAPTCHA, before you’ve done anything at all. None of these steps create value. They exist because somewhere, someone tried to cheat the system, and now everyone pays for it.

This piece traces where that friction comes from: why institutions add it independently without coordinating, why it almost never gets removed once it exists, and why a handful of companies have built real businesses around selling trust back to the rest of us. I’m calling the accumulated backlog “trust debt,” borrowing the same logic we already use for technical debt and financial debt.

Full essay below.

https://structuralsignals.com/the-trust-tax/