I think the author of this article is making an either/or argument about centralized vs. decentralized trust when this can just as easily be a both/and proposit

I think the author of this article is making an either/or argument about centralized vs. decentralized trust when this can just as easily be a both/and proposition. Cryptocurrencies have not yet eliminated and may never eliminate the need for centralized reputation based systems of trust. Centralized trusted systems are more efficient for reasons that may be fundamental and rooted in physics and math, and they can do things that no current generation decentralized system can do. Complex secure computations that are cheap to perform on a server are massively expensive on a block chain or other distributed system. Yet what cryptocurrencies do offer is a system that levels the playing field between trusted entities and allows a once-trusted but now corrupt entity to be replaced without completely ditching the entire system. That's not true of things like centrally banked fiat currencies. If the current US financial system becomes irredeemably corrupt, this can't really be fixed without risking the destruction of the dollar and all assets and contracts denominated in dollars. A new dark age is a very high price to pay for the replacement of a corrupt or incompetent system. I think an argument can be made that replacement of institutions will always be necessary at some point. As institutions become large their size insulates them from reality, allowing something like "genetic drift" to occur that gradually erodes their competence. Combine this with the fact that psychopaths gravitate toward positions of power and you have a general tendency of large powerful systems toward decay and corruption over time. We saw a very concrete example of this in 2008 when banking institutions that had failed badly due to a mixture of incompetence, hubris, and corruption received a blank-check bailout on the backs of taxpayers and the rest of the non-financial economy. It is no coincidence that cryptocurrency went mainstream right after this, since these events demonstrated the need to start thinking about ways to devolve power away from these systems or at least to reduce the cost of doing so. Side note: I think we've officially entered the cryptocurrency / block chain trough of disillusionment. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle