I wrote the piece below in 2022 about crypto; read it again now in 2026 and swap every instance of “crypto” for “AI.” The argument not only holds but the grip is even tighter today…

Different priests are selling us the same lie. Crypto promised “trustless money,” while AI promises “trustless truth.” Both claims do the same trick: they take the word “trust” and pretend to eliminate it, when what’s actually happening is that trust is being moved away from humans and onto the machines built by humans we can’t, and into the small handful of companies who ship the systems that now decide what’s real, what’s true, what’s worth reading, what’s worth making.

In 2022, I said trust doesn’t just magically disappear in the blockchain; rather, it gets displaced from humans to the humans who built the machines. In 2026, the same sentence describes nearly every generative AI product on earth. The difference now is that the machines got a thousand times more persuasive, the humans behind them got a thousand times richer, and the rest of us got a thousand times more tired of trying to figure out what’s real.

The only way out is still through. Which is to say, the only real answer is verified human attribution and the process it took to make the Reality. Who made this and how, verified by the IP owners. Not “on-chain,” or in a model .mg file.

Unreality creative human credits and verification are in the open, with names, roles, and profiles to match.

Trust is all that’s left. Let’s build it, together, on unreality.is.

Read the original post from Medium below.

Drop a comment or DM for more.

xo

jb

The Price of Gas

Justin Bolognino

Apr 1, 2022

Building Trust in a Trustless World

Super-rad “Sandworm 220312” by Jaime Derringer

As an artist, my most notable creative feat has been helping other artists to get paid. Since the origins of META back in 2009, we’ve said “Our CSR (corporate social responsibility) is getting immersive creators paid.”

Over the past twelve+ years, we’ve paid out many millions of dollars to artists, producers, and technologists. We have a long, steady track record in doing over 100 deals, sometimes as the brand/artist ourselves, sometimes between artist and buyer, sometimes on behalf of the buyer, sometimes on behalf of the artist. Safe to say I’ve seen and signed off on just about every type of transaction possible in the immersive media/creative technology/metaverse space. With the rise of NFTs, we’re seeing what is proposed to be the ultimate moment of validation for what we’ve worked so tediously for. Digital artists are finally getting the pay, recognition, and notoriety they deserve.

Indeed, through a “centralized” and “trust-based” process, working with lawyers, managers, bookkeepers, and all the various “middlemen” who have been trained on the nuances to execute such deals, the process is slow, tedious, and ultimately thankless. We’ve paid SWIFT fees, checking fees, yearly banking fees, same-day wire fees, and overdraft fees; pick your fee, we’ve paid them. So much of this system is built upon trust between entities. Trust in upholding contracts. Trust in upholding ‘good faith’ agreements. Trust that the ‘expert’ you’re hiring will deliver on their expertise. Trust that the banks will do what they say. Trust that the NDA will be upheld. It’s trust all the way up, and all the way down. Some would say Trust is the very glue that holds human civilization together.

One key promise of blockchain and crypto technologies is that they are “trustless” systems, meant to mitigate or remove the need to trust in the human. The technology itself is doing the trust for you because those pesky humans can’t be trusted. Another hyperbole in the on-chain stack, “trustless” is right up there with “decentralized”; a nice idea on paper, yet simply impossible to manifest into reality. “Trustless” is another disingenuous and hyperbolic use of language, simply because there is still trust to be had, instead of in humans, into the technology itself, which was… built by… wait for it: humans. We’re not building a “trustless” system, instead, deferring or displacing our trust into this system. There’s still trust; it’s just being aimed away from humans and onto machines.

The below screenshot covers only a tiny fraction of recent hacks, now totaling in the many billions. But, don’t worry — you can trust the tech.

While I still reserve hope for many of the promises of an on-chain internet, most of the claims fall into the “not yet” category. “Right now, Web3 is a mess of a shit show, but soon… SOON!! Jesus will come and save it, and everything will be tidy and orderly and TRUSTLESS!”

As “META”, I’m often asked for my option on all of this, and my typical response these days is based more on need than trust. “Do we need Web3 and NFTs to solve this problem?” And is this a system to support artists in a truly authentic manner? While there are some incredible art projects out there, the NFT world is so wrought with scams, fraud, Ponzi schemes, rug pulls, etc. to a degree unseen in any other industry. These schemes grow exponentially as we’re told to turn over our trust in the technology. Is this world really about supporting the artists? Are we giving more value than we extract?

We don’t need middlemen anymore. These so called experts slow down our ability to live freely as we please. The DAO will automate our trust. We don’t need to spend our hard-earned money on these gatekeepers. Instead, we are now asked to fork over “gas fees” to platforms, the new “middlemen” in these “trustless” transactions. In attempting to support artist Jaime Derringer for the above piece I adore, the Gas Fee on the transaction was $189 on top of the $625 to purchase the NFT. This was after the $27 paid in fees to convert ETH to WETH, then back to ETH, because “oops.” I tried a few more times over days for lower gas, the lowest I ever saw was $82.

Back to the question: do we “need” to be supporting artists this way? So we can point to the ‘public ledger’ to show that we ‘own’ this NFT? That’s the value? That everyone knows this is “mine”? I can’t even say this body is “mine,” or this life is “mine” by the grace of Nature; I don’t believe either of those things. We’re asked to “believe” this safe, trustless future is coming, just “not yet.” It seems this culture is more about the ‘belief’ than the actual support of said artists. Let’s just say it’s “definitely not ideal…”

In asking myself this “need” question, at least today, the answer is a resounding NO. I don’t need the public ledger to validate my worth in transacting against the value of a fellow human’s art. So I did what any good patron of the arts would do. I broke out my paper checkbook and wrote Jaime a check with a pen. I put that check into a centralized, federally secure (by penalty of law) “stamped envelope” and paid the whopping $0.58 in “gas fees,” aka a stamp. Jamie says, “But what if you want to sell it on the secondary market.” As a true patron of her art, the last thing I’d ever want to do is resell it. The thought didn’t even cross my mind and is the antithesis of why I purchase any of the art I do. Call me crazy, but I’m not investing in an asset class, I’m surrounding myself with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.

Maybe instead of finding more “Trustlessness” we should be also focused on finding ways to… build more trust in each other? It’s a both/and solution. Communicate our terms and negotiate in ‘good faith,’ and use our actions in the world to slowly continue to build that trust? To not steal from each other, instead, validate and accredit and pay each other our worth without validating it with evidence on a public ledger? It’s slow, messy, tedious, and doesn’t always work.

Call me old fashion, but I’ll continue to work to find ways to build trust with other humans. No matter how many times I’ve been burned, I will continue to focus on building better systems of human trust, one human at a time.

You’ll have to trust me on that.

Love,

jb

Everything looks like a fail

(Wrote this piece in early October of 2025 and shelved it. Opening it up now, March 31, 2026)

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