Trustless is the biggest lie in crypto

Everyone in this space trusts something. We just don't talk about it.

• You trust that the smart contract was audited properly.
• You trust the oracle feed is giving you accurate data.
• You trust bridge validators aren't colluding.
• You trust the L2 sequencer isn't censoring your transactions.

Thats not trustless. That's trust with no accountability.

When a bridge gets exploited who faces consequnces? When an oracle feed gets manipulated who is liable? Nobody. The trust was always there, it was just hidden behind the word decentralised.

I would say that tradfi actually handles this better in one specific way. When your bank screws up, someone is accountable. There's regulators, there's insurance, there's legal consequences. We threw all of that out and called it progress, or it simply hasn't found a way to do that in a way that satisfies this strange definition of trustless.

I'm not saying crypto should become tradfi. But I think the industry has confused removing intermediaries with removing accountability. Those are not the same thing.

I'm already hearing people about to ask - well what should accountability or trust look like then huh?

What if we just made it explicit? You know exactly who you're trusting. Their credentials are publicly verifiable, and they face real consequences (legal, financial, criminal, etc) if they act fraudulently.

That's not a step backwards. I'd argue thats the piece that's actually missing, and that the reason that we don't have adequate on-chain protection products isn't because of a tech problem. But because there's no accountabillity layer.

So I'm not convinced that the "trustless" framing something worth defending. There has to be some trust. I think it's time to admit that explicit, accountable trust would actually be more useful than pretending trust doesn't exist.