Trustless has become a rallying cry for Bitcoin evangelists, focusing public attention on the fact that Bitcoin enables P2P transactions without the participation of a trusted third party acting as an intermediary.
Bitcoin makes it possible to conduct money transfers without intermediaries — intermediaries who could, otherwise, gain control over funds in a transaction, censor transactions, or act as points of failure. Does this give grounds to assert that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are a form of money that does not require trust? Is it possible to completely eliminate trust from monetary relations, and is there even a need to? This article is devoted to the study of the role of trust in monetary transactions, including cryptocurrencies, and its main conclusion is that this role is hard to overestimate.