nah. no offense but you don’t understand how it works.

there is nothing preventing you from running your own node or miner.

also, you are overextending the meaning of trust. Do you trust air when you’re breathing? Do you trust traffic lights? Do you trust you’re going to eliminate excess water through pee?

The point is that if you have a series of established rules and a way to verify that they are actually applied as designed, it does not really matter who applies them.

One miner cannot become a bad actor and invent its own rules.

I wouldn't say running your own miner is necessarily the way to not "trust anyone (else)", because at the current global hashrate the chance that your individual miner will get to mint a block with your transaction in it is basically zero.

The more correct answer is that your transaction has fees, which is why other miners are motivated to include it in their next block. (And also why a majority of the hashrate being centralized into a single entity with a singular will is a doomsday scenario for bitcoin.)

Exactly, and fees are only an incentive. There's nothing stopping miners from discarding your transaction. Therefore trust that miners won't discard your transaction is required.

Fees being an incentive == trust is a strange definition of trust. But if that's the definition you want to roll with, sure distributed currencies rely on trust.

the "only" part before "an incentive" was important. They weren't saying because the fees are an incentive there is therefore trust, but rather, that one is trusting that, essentially, that this incentive will be enough.

Of course, the concern that some particular miner might just have it out for you to a degree that outweighs this incentive, or who has some other incentive to not include your transaction, is more mitigated when there are more separate/independent miners/pools .

also, in case of asteroid impact you will lose all your money. what's your point?

why would the miners discard a transaction and not another one given that the value they extract is the same?

I don't know why they would discard a transaction. The point is that they can discard transactions, which appears to invalidate the claim that bitcoin payments are "uncensorable" and "trustless".