yes, requiring external trust to exist between parties is a very effective strategy, I agree, but it's not a solution to the general problem where trustlessness

yes, requiring external trust to exist between parties is a very effective strategy, I agree, but it's not a solution to the general problem where trustlessness is required. And if you are requiring trust between parties... you might as well simply have an auditable database instead of requiring staking or mining at all. (requiring oracular knowledge (external to the system) that other VCs have a financial stake is still a trust-based system... and they could still sell that to someone who doesn't, and fuck you over, and your knowledge that they won't do that for social or contractual reasons is still oracular knowledge. You haven't solved anything, you've just created an oracle that everyone agrees to trust, which is a trivial solution to almost all challenges within crypto.)