Bridging the gap between untrusting devs and trust-seeking users

While Satoshi's achievement in designing a consensus protocol for a totally decentralized system isn't overrated, the setup of total trustlessness imposes severe limitations on its scalability. Protocols which give some authority to recognized nodes are easily more scalable and efficient; yet, this boost in performance comes at the expense of needing to trust these nodes. This trust can take vastly different forms, from trusting a single entity with the integrity of the data, to trusting it with the persistence of the state, to trusting it merely for good performance of the system. This spectrum of trust can potentially bridge the gap between developers who advocate for full decentralization and redundancy of the base platform and product managers who are interested in use cases for ordinary trusting end-users.