Marco

do you mean: do they serve my interests, who's interests are they serving, how do I evaluate if they are serving my best interests (regardless of whether they are obligated to or not (btw, if they have no formal legal obligation to your interests, then I would submit that Conflicts of Interest are inapplicable here)). Unfortunately this is extremely hard to evaluate and requires individual due diligence. So what some people do is they rely on others to help Interpret for them. But then you have to do due diligence on all the "helpful Interpreters" - social media personalities, podcast hosts, etc-- whose interests do those personalities serve? what is their incentive? Are they causing outrage to e.g. gain traction, subscribes, or attention? Is there any hope for people who cannot independently and productively reason about the world? One wrong click, and a phishing attack gets you? If your strategy is trust-based, then it might actually be a better strategy to use trust-based institutions (banks etc) because of the legal frameworks that have evolved around that-- it concentrates trust in the government or established legal system, which definitely has problems and does not always protect or act in any given individual's best interests, but it at least does provide a trust-based framework for trust-based navigating the world. By comparison, the bitcoin model isn't trust based and is much closer to "everyone is independently and individually responsible for evaluating Bitcoin source code and making a decision about whether they want to use this bitcoin code" -- there are no anointed governance priests in bitcoin... Yeah there's some positive reputation that has accumulated to some Bitcoin Core contributors, that's true, but to me that's something everyone ought to not rely on as a technical proof or signal - yes I know we are very social creatures haha. Even if every bitcoin developer in the world was extremely hated by the general public, no positive reputation whatsoever, I would personally still find bitcoin to be a very interesting project and still not appropriate to use trust based reasoning (although I might double check what all the hate is about just to see if there's anything new there!). Btw, being unable to apply the principles of social trust to bitcoin doesn't mean bitcoin is "trustless" tech, like YOLO just use it without checking anything as the only alternative to trust-based systems of socially perceiving reality, instead it's more like "you will have to trust yourself and your ability to reason about the world and real-world consequences" tech.

Bitcoin, a $2T ecosystem based on software, can't reach consensus on 9 lines of code needed to allow more and better scale (op_CAT). And it can't agree, for past 4 years, on any other minor change/update. Pretty insane.

1/ The debate over Bitcoin’s utility and sustainability began already with Nakamoto’s 2008 work. Many economists see Bitcoin as a speculative bubble that will eventually burst, leaving behind substantial social damage amid its high energy use and facilitating illicit payments.