Imagine you had a house but the only way you could access it was to either call up a12 word phrase every time you wanted to enter, or trust someone else that they can hold your phrase but never use it, and if they broke the promise your house would be gone forever. Moreover if you ever lost your 12 words and third party ‘convenience’ key you would also lose your house forever. And not only that, the price of houses might continue to rise, forever making your loss more painful.

Now imagine that your house’s structure, rarity and other fundamental aspects could be changed by other people who owned houses. You were told that there would only ever be 21m of your house, but that number has been doubled a few times in history with the ‘non-houses’ conveniently relabelled as ‘kennels’ or something. Yet every house owner repeats that there has only ever been 21m of your house and there only ever will be.

You start to think that maybe you should sell your house. Of course mentioning this to other house owners is the quickest way not to be invited over for dinner parties. But you persist. You work out the way to sell this asset is either through a centralised exchange that required 100 points of ID and could freeze your account without notice or reasonable dispute, or label your house as ‘tainted’, through a decentralised exchange that is technically illegal in many countries or an in person meetup where a $5 wrench might convince you to part with your house for no compensation.

You decide to trust the centralised agency, no, the decentralised one, no the in person stranger…. wondering why so much trust is required in this house system you were told was trustless.

You get out at a price you think is a bit below what you thought, and decide to buy an actual house.

5/10 at best.