> No they don't, they are trustless. They do exactly the opposite.
They allow anyone to build a trusted application. That is the sense in which they democratize trust. Prior to crypto, anyone building a stateful software application that ran remotely had to be trusted by their users. Their users had to have personal faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization. Even if the organization was ostensibly open source, there was no way to validate what the code on their servers was doing, or where the data was going. Crypto changes that.
It enables anyone to write an application, deploy it, and guarantee to its users that it does what the code says it does. That is a new thing in the history of software. Whether or not you think that thing is valuable is up to you. That it is new, and that crypto does it, is not.
They allow anyone to build a trusted application. That is the sense in which they democratize trust. Prior to crypto, anyone building a stateful software application that ran remotely had to be trusted by their users. Their users had to have personal faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of the organization. Even if the organization was ostensibly open source, there was no way to validate what the code on their servers was doing, or where the data was going. Crypto changes that.
It enables anyone to write an application, deploy it, and guarantee to its users that it does what the code says it does. That is a new thing in the history of software. Whether or not you think that thing is valuable is up to you. That it is new, and that crypto does it, is not.