Great post! Lots of interesting points to chew on.

I think I'm a little less confident than others on here that trust services will be dominated by the big, incumbent institutions. Think of how important PayPal was in establishing a trust layer in the early days of e-commerce. True, big institutions have a lot of resources, but point 3 under "What is Against Them" is a big deal. Big institutions develop institutional knowledge around a certain way of doing things. When I was at a bank, people were so specialized that it would be very hard to pivot to something as radical as blockchain-based escrow or something. And even companies that have strong development chops (e.g., Google) might not be proficient at some of these trust functions (see Google's failed car insurance experiment). What's more, the small and relatively infrequent transactions we're talking about here may not generate enough profits for a big company to want to pursue them (what Clayton Christensen might call "assymetric motivation" vis a vis the upstarts).

Clayton Christensen's "Innovators Solution" and the 1990 Henderson-Clark article "Architectural Innovation" might provide some good models of how to think about this industry evolution.