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

Question

【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.

MEVHunter · Accepted Answer

That hits the nail on the head... For chains with high complexity, very few people can fully understand the mempool system. Honestly, it's still a gamble on the integrity of the development team. I personally experienced this when running arbitrage bots—whether sandwich attacks can be prevented, how much room there is for gas optimization—these aspects are inherently determined by the chain's design, and users are essentially blind.

LiquidatedTwice · Answer

Honestly, I deeply understand this. Last year's series of flash loan attack incidents, some of the older brothers explained for a long time, and I was still confused. It was only later that I realized—huh, isn't this just a trust issue wearing a different mask?

GweiTooHigh · Answer

That's right, which is why so many people are still blindly believing in trading cryptocurrencies without really understanding what they're doing.

NftBankruptcyClub · Answer

That's quite insightful; simplifying the protocol is indeed more meaningful than just piling up node counts.

SocialAnxietyStaker · Answer

Exactly right, decentralization is a joke. What's the use of having many nodes? In the end, you still have to trust those big V's and developers. Might as well just use PoS and let the whales dominate.