Trust math, not people” represents the ultimate engineer’s cop-out. It’s not the dispassionate advance of enlightenment, but a deliberate retreat from the field of moral complexity. It imagines that systems can substitute for virtue, that protocols can eliminate the tragic dimension, that risk and trust and error can somehow be erased rather than always needing to be held, managed, forgiven, sometimes endured.

When Bitcoin maximalists celebrate the system’s indifference to human concerns as a feature rather than a bug, they reveal the anti-human heart of their philosophy. They’re not just advocating for a new financial tool; they’re promoting a worldview where human judgment, compassion, and moral agency are seen as weaknesses to be engineered away.

Bitcoin still requires trust in the developers who write and maintain the code, in the community that could execute a 51% attack, in the miners who confirm transactions, in the exchanges where most people buy and sell, and in the social consensus that gives the tokens value. What appears as “trustless” is actually just trust laundered through technology, obscured but not eliminated. The system doesn’t remove the need for trust; it relocates it, often in ways that make accountability harder rather than easier.