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One of the allures of cryptocurrencies is their potential to offer a “trustless” system where investors don’t have to trust whether the person at the other end of their deal will make good on it, unlike the 2008 financial crisis when banks were going bust.

Because in the crypto world, a lot of the pitch was “It’s trustless. You don’t have to trust.”

It’s nihilistic and idealistic; decentralized and dominated by a few mega-billionaires; trustless and faith-based; public and encrypted; transparent and inscrutable; and a utopian anarchist invention beloved by drug cartels, terrorists, and Kim Jong-Un.

The contract also specifies that copyrights only transfer if the NFT is legally sold — so stealing somebody’s token doesn’t give you all the rights associated with them. a16z frames the copyright licenses as a more “trustless” version of NFT ownership, which is right in some sense: it potentially offers more clarity over the tokens’ legal value rather than relying on handshake deals and vague promises.

What we found is this whole mantra of a trustless economy, we shouldn’t have trusted many of these new actors.