You're right on a lot of things here, (I appreciate the slightly humorous, gratuitous take on bad actors having had a bad upbringing) but you seem to be inverti

You're right on a lot of things here, (I appreciate the slightly humorous, gratuitous take on bad actors having had a bad upbringing) but you seem to be inverting the flaws in the no-trust paradigm into a trust-but-verify paradigm based on an assumption of implicit goodness which is no more borne out by reality than the assumption of implicit evil. Maybe it makes more sense to look at it all through a different lens. Classical, post-mercantile liberal economics, - that is, liberalism - is entirely built around a framework for dealing with the question of establishing trust between parties: Individuals do not have to establish trust, or agree with each other, or be friends, if they certify that they acquiesce to a system where the market is well regulated. In exchange they get the advantage of being in a market where trade can be a non-zero game that advantages both parties. The problem with crypto as it stands has something to do with unregulated markets, something to do with bad actors, but a lot more to do with the fact that no one has yet come up with a use for deflationary currency that's something other than a zero-sum game.