But if the network is entierely built upon selfish interest, you cant complain in the same breath that miner act selfish and steal your money because it's profitable to them, or miner empty block for the same raeson. Perfectly acceptable behavior then. Nothing more to expect from any conscious being.
That is exactly what I expect of a decentralized, trustless system: a web of greedy cheating bastards wanting to rip off one another so much that they can only come to the consensus of a working, fair system ; and in fact, of any form of society in general (which, at its most abstract level, IS a trustless, decentralized system, governed by the immutable and non-centralized laws of physics). I think any picturing of anything else but that is but delusion, with the purpose to misguide the preys at best, and based upon misunderstanding at worst.
It's what I call the sociopathic/paranoiac theory, that no one can be trusted, everyone is the enmy, and you are on your own against everyone else.
Trustless is to be taken in the context of cryptography, ultimately you still want to trust the network, even if not relying on the other party of transaction or a single third party, but there is still need to be trust in the network.
And this idea that the network is populated only by greedy cheating bastards and that it's only the good cop software that keep everything in check, is really overrated.
When you look at how pooled mining work, it's even very unlikely most miner even check the validity of transaction and merkkle root and that it actually match the block headers template.
Where I want to get at is that the level of security that is actually provided by the network in term of trustlessness and decentralisation is very overrated.
It's well known bitcoin works if 51% of node are honest.