I touch on a lot of issues you mentioned in the last third of the article. I agree that decentralization removes accountability, protections, and the associated

I touch on a lot of issues you mentioned in the last third of the article. I agree that decentralization removes accountability, protections, and the associated trust. Moreover, with crypto, we are trusting the developers of the underlying software rather than government institutions for fiat. I would argue there isn't a compelling reason developers should be seen as more trustworthy. To be honest, I went into researching for this article with a bias against cryptocurrency, but ended with a belief that there is possibly an opportunity for fiat + crypto to form a more trustworthy system where transactions + the creation of new currency was logged where everyone can see. However, to actually realize this would require a lot of changes in current crypto architecture (particularly around the consensus algorithm and its current computation cost).