Reading through the trustless vault paper, one line stuck: a single staked BTC vault carries three separate spending conditions built in from the start — redemption, liquidation, slashing — each requiring its own proof path before the lock even opens. Compare that to how Side Protocol handles BTC lending, where a committee just signs off as counterparty and everyone trusts the committee. Babylon #Babylon $BABY @BabylonLabs_io chose the harder road on purpose: removing the trusted committee didn't remove complexity, it relocated it into BitVM3's garbled circuits and zero-knowledge proofs, pushed off-chain so the fraud proofs stay compact enough for Bitcoin's own scripting limits to handle. The narrative around trustlessness always sounds like subtraction — no middleman, no custodian, no trust required — but building it apparently meant addition: more spending conditions, more proof generation, more conditions that all have to resolve correctly before BTC moves. It reads less like elegance and more like an engineering trade nobody advertises out loud. Worth asking whether "trustless" and "simple" were ever supposed to be the same promise, or if that conflation is doing more marketing work than the cryptography itself.