It’s odd to me that everyone seems to believe different things with regard to what the creators of these cryptocurrencies originally intended for the technology

It’s odd to me that everyone seems to believe different things with regard to what the creators of these cryptocurrencies originally intended for the technology. I don’t think Ethereum has failed at being a different entity than banks where a central authority can make arbitrary decisions. At the end of the day, Ethereum is still community driven. In my opinion the main benefit of Ethereum and other blockchain technologies is transparency. Everyone can choose to go over the books and anyone can check discrepancies in the blockchain if some parties try to cheat. The beauty of this is that because there’s no formalized government, value can be generated by global consensus and currencies can be picked up and dropped based on whether the contributors are faithfully serving the community.