It's game theory. There are simpler ways to explain distributing incentives that reward honesty. E.g. If a mother has two kids that fight over the last piece of cake, if she splits the cake into two pieces, the kids will fight about who gets to pick first. The way to gamify this is to let one split the cake, and the other pick first. The one splitting will do their best to split exactly even so that no unfair advantage is given to the other. The mother supervises the transaction, but the kids control the outcome.

In a similar way, the Bitcoin protocol supervises the miners, and the miners have been incentivized to be honest.