As for what Tok is trying to say here (I believe, I could be getting him wrong, hate to put words in people's mouths) is that cryptonote was designed initially to be used with a central authority that holds the "keys".
Okay well that's totally wrong.
Throwing those keys away only makes it impossible for anyone, not even a central authority to verify what happened, inside or outside of the blockchain. The cryptography must be trusted, which kills the whole concept of trustless.
This totally misunderstands the concept of a blockchain. To verify a blockchain (even Bitcoin) requires cryptography. Unless you rely on cryptography, you could easily be given some fake bunch of data that looks like a blockchain but is actually nonsense.