Comment by biztos

1. They can (theoretically) examine the whole ledger.

2. Your possession of the private key “verifies” your public key, if someone takes it they are now you.

3. Depends on the consensus mechanism but in the best case, “everyone” and in the worst case “coinbase.”

4. You don’t trust them, the system is supposed to be trustworthy with untrustworthy participants, and when that’s not true you will just have to trust the architects of the hard fork.

5. Magical off-chain oracle!