Power concentration is not inherent to central banks; it's inherent to government-provided money of any sort. (And as David Graeber's work on "Debt" suggests, g

Power concentration is not inherent to central banks; it's inherent to government-provided money of any sort. (And as David Graeber's work on "Debt" suggests, government money is in turn fundamental and closely related to other basic functions of government, including dispute resolution! The sorts of exchanges for which you need money the most are also the exchanges where the dispute-resolution function provided by government courts is important.) Even gold/silver currency never actually solved this, because people never really used well-defined amounts of pure gold/silver as money; they use either paper currency or coinage, either of which were quite frequently debased. And because the supply of gold and silver is only weakly correlated with what the economy needs to keep nominal incomes on a predictable path (which mitigates market frictions and delivers a smoother-functioning economy, for standard "Keynesian" reasons), there is no well-established solution to this issue; in practice, we've settled on having centralized issuance of money, and having it managed by an independent authority, with strong, constitutional-level guarantees to that effect. For essentially historical reasons, we like to call that authority a "central bank".