You're right, but it's because we made the conscious decision to not have a totally-open playing field after seeing how it went.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.
I don't think crypto will replace the financial systems we have or that we should burn down what's already there. I think the way it will play out is that it will increasingly get used on the backend of the legacy financial system. So the front end will appear similar to the consumer with the same usability and protections they're used to, while the backend will be settling transaction using a variety of crypto networks. The consumer will then have the option of using the centralized front ends or communicating directly with the decentralized crypto protocols.
It's like the old code base: we made a bunch of incremental design decisions over 50+ years that are all layered on top of each other. They are now so complex that nobody can coherently explain the whole thing. But does that mean we should burn it down? Not necessarily. If we rebuild from scratch, we're liable to simply re-learn why we built the hacky solution in the first place.
Crypto is great. It's a wonderful innovation - and will likely succeed in many ways. But it won't replace central banks and regulators (except, potentially, by replicating them) because the institutions are actually useful.