[Arrgh]

Building a trust relationship between commercial entities isn't automatable; it nearly always requires a contract to be carefully hand-written and argued over by high-priced lawyers before any meaningful exchange of value can take place.

Sure, this is an unfortunate level of friction, and overkill in many cases, but think about it from a cost/benefit perspective: I can spend $10k on legal fees and successfully avoid not just a lot of uncertainty, but very infrequently, the contract also protects me from losses that can be orders of magnitude larger than it cost me to negotiate the contract.