According to comments from longtime researcher and computer scientist Nick Szabo, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are trust-minimized, not trustless, and that difference matters for how states and private actors can push back.
Szabo warned that while the layer one of a strong trust-minimized system can endure many kinds of interference, legal routes remain a meaningful vulnerability.
Szabo told readers that the technical design reduces the need to trust single parties, yet it does not eliminate the need for trust entirely.
According to his view, losing the phrase “trustless” and using “trust-minimized” is important because it points to real limits. Developers must keep the protocol informed by careful choices.
Anarcho-capitalism is a wonderfully abstract ideal that can inspire innovation. It helped inspire me to help invent cryptocurrency.
But real-world cryptocurrencies are not trustless — they are trust-minimized. Each cryptocurrency has a legal attack surface, representing the…
Lawyers have become part of the defense too, he said, and that legal work has made financial law attacks manageable in many cases.
Not everyone agrees. One critic, Chris Seedor, who runs a Bitcoin seed storage company called Seedor, pushed back and called some legal fears “boogeymen.”
Based on reports of his remarks, Seedor argued that states can try to use law to stop tools and protocols, but history shows limits.
Respectfully, I think you’re giving too much weight to speculative legal boogeymen.
Bitcoin’s resilience was never about predicting every possible domain of law – it was about minimizing technical points where coercion can bite. If regulators could shut down general-purpose data…
The debate is partly about emphasis. Szabo focuses on open legal questions and new kinds of laws that could be used to target content or arbitrary data placed on-chain. Seedor highlights how technical design can remove the lever points that make enforcement easy.
Both are talking about the same problem from different directions: one looks at the legal map and sees many untested routes; the other looks at past enforcement and sees that states rarely win against widely distributed protocols.
Featured image from Yagi Studio/Flavio Coelho/Getty Images, chart from TradingView
