[edgyquant]

Nope not true at all. Every industry has shared information between corporations. The sciences are ripe for trustless data sets between antagonistic entities (see: nation states.)

Trustless doesn’t mean every individual human being is an equal in the chain. The more applicable situation is between organization and higher. If you think all problems are just money problems you haven’t solved many large scale real world problems.

[tsimionescu]

There are two kinds of facts: facts about the real world, and digital facts. Digital facts can be secured with fancy cryptography in various ways leading to the ability of a trustless database holding such facts - such as a (secured) git repo or the Bitcoin blockchain.

Facts about the real world are true or false about the real world, you can't cryptographically secure them. I can trustlessly store the fact "I am Donald Trump" in some DB, I can prove cryptographically that I stored that fact, but there is no way to conclude from this that I am in fact Donald Trump.

For any digital fact, the relationship between it and a physical fact can only be established by a trusted entity. A government office can digitally sign a statement that the holder of some private key is indeed Donald Trump, and you can then believe that any statement signed by that private key was signed by Donald Trump - IF you trust the government.

Similarly, whether some scientific data set is held in a Chinese RDBMS controlled by a Chinese university or whether it is stored on some public block chain, I have more or less the same amount of trust for that data set.