[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.