Trustless

Most relationships require trust. When you put your money in a bank, you are trusting the bank personnel to give you the money back when you ask them to. And usually, they do. But in rare cases, they won’t. For instance, the government might wrongly convict you of a crime and seize your money from the bank. In that case, the bank would not return your money. So the system requires that you trust both the government and the bank.

A trustless system is designed so that you don’t have to rely on a person who could make a promise but later change their mind. If you ask the banker “will you return my money?” the banker will surely say yes, and mean it sincerely, the possibility of the government seizing the money being far from the banker's mind. The banker might be a very honest person, but you can see that you still can’t trust the banker.

On the other hand, when you put some BTC in a bitcoin wallet and keep the private keys to yourself, you can be sure that BTC is going to stay there until you want to take it out, and if you put the key in, you can take it out and sent it to another wallet and it will surely arrive if you give a real wallet address. There is no one who can change their mind. There is nothing that can happen (short of an attack that takes over thousands of computers somehow) that will create an unexpected outcome. You don’t have to trust a well-designed blockchain the same way you don’t have to trust the sun to rise; you can be sure of what happens in a trustless way.

How is the concept of being trustless relevant to the Network State?

If we want to, we can trust our nation state governments to operate by their own rules. Given history, that seems a bit naive. We can create some great rules as modern democracies, but we can’t be sure to follow them. Trustless blockchain technology can ensure that for Network State citizens, the rules you agree to are the rules you actually get.