>The whole point of bitcoin is trustless action. I don't have to trust you because I can verify the transaction. If anyone can verify a transaction, it's obvio

>The whole point of bitcoin is trustless action. I don't have to trust you because I can verify the transaction. If anyone can verify a transaction, it's obviously traceable. But you do not need everyone to verify but instead take a shortcut and just verify the proof. That's what zero knowledge proofs are all about [0]. Unfortunately a lot of people pass over these subtleties. So, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "verify". >"Ah but Monero" no. Monero requires you to trust the authors because you can't verify any of the transactions, especially the genesis blocks. Use at your own peril. Can you elaborate on this point? By "verify" again, you simply mean a transparent blockchain where every tx and address is unambiguously visible to all. E.g. Ring signatures aren't something you need to trust the authors.[1][2] But in general, yes, at some point without being able to "verify" the whole code I have to "trust". This is true for every sufficiently large enterprise. For example there are a lot of (complicated) mathematical proofs I didn't fully go through but nonetheless used shamelessly in my mathematical modeling because I "trusted" its applications (I have learned from). [0]https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/26/snarks.html [1]https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098 https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098 [2]https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/508 https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/508