[zodiac]

> And once you outsource the security you're no longer in a "trustless" state. The "trustless" pipe-dream (in the consumer use case) all sort of unravels from there for me.

I think the conclusion doesn't follow. An analogous solution is that traditional public-key cryptography (e.g. as implemented in TLS) is supposed to be trustless, but I haven't personally audited or even read any of the relevant code (e.g. TLS), so I'm "not in a trustless state". It doesn't follow that TLS is useless for me.

[manbart]

TLS relies on trusted certificate authorities though. I don't think it was ever intended to be trustless, in fact you specifically get warnings when a trusted certificate authority cannot be found for a given cert.

[zodiac]

I was actually referring to the transport encryption which is designed to be "trustless" (but which, as you point out, is distinct from the digital certificates part)

[vel0city]

Traditional public key cryptography is inherently trustful. Either you're trusting a key because they physically gave it to you, or the key is downloaded from a trusted key server, or the key was signed by a trusted certificate authority, or you got the signing key from a server using HTTPS with a signed webserver certificate, etc.

[localhost3000]

My comment wasn't suggesting that blockchain is "useless" (that obviously isn't true), just that the "trustless" argument doesn't hold up for me, and that is a primary argument for why blockchain is awesome at pretty much every event/talk I go to on the topic.

[zodiac]

So what would you characterize the "trustless argument" as being? Would you say that an analogous argument could be made for TLS?