Why is the "comprehensibility" of a protocol the true foundation of trustlessness?

【BitPush】Recently, when discussing the Ethereum ecosystem, there’s an interesting perspective worth pondering. Many people’s understanding of decentralization mainly focuses on superficial aspects like node distribution and power balancing. But there’s a more easily overlooked dimension—how many people can truly understand how the protocol works from start to finish?

It sounds a bit academic, but it’s actually very crucial. Imagine if only a few top engineers can fully understand the logic of a certain public chain; then the entire system is still implicitly dependent on these individuals. The higher the technical complexity, the more serious this trust concentration becomes—users must blindly trust that the development team hasn’t hidden any malicious code.

Currently, Ethereum’s protocol design indeed has room for optimization. If we can simplify the design and reduce system complexity to enable more people to participate in auditing and verification, transparency, security, and risk resistance can all be improved. In other words, allowing ordinary participants to understand protocol details is the true essence of decentralization.