In the 90s I was part of the cypherpunks movement and a total devotee of the idea that decentralized currency, unbreakable cryptography, mix-nets, etc was going

In the 90s I was part of the cypherpunks movement and a total devotee of the idea that decentralized currency, unbreakable cryptography, mix-nets, etc was going to make it impossible for state power to govern cyberspace, and John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace would be made real. But this turned out to be the high naïveté of a young person. First of all, the physical world is the ultimate gatekeeper, and so unless you are uploaded into the matrix, you're going to need access to stuff in the real world, and those off ramps and real world requirements can still easily come under the control of governments. Secondly, a lot of "decentralized" stuff becomes centralized rapidly because it turns out there are still efficiency gains from centralization, and a lot of people don't want to include costs to upkeep these systems. As you saw with miners, eventually the folks who had cheap access to energy, and capital resources to buy large farms of equipment, could tend to monopolize a significant amount of hashing power. And when you look at technologies like IPFS, again, people are much more interesting in consuming files than letting their computer resources be used to provide part of the network. I suppose BitTorrent is a counter example since enough people seem to be seeders, but I'm not convinced it'll scale to replace the entire Web. Look at SMTP/IMAP. Decentralized and federated, one of the oldest protocols on the net. Yet, almost all of humanity gets their email from a few big providers handling billions of addresses. Hardly anyone runs an SMTP server at home. A decentralized protocol today becomes a centralized protocol tomorrow if there is any net economic/efficiency benefit to centralizing. That means eventually there will be a power asymmetry and all of the vaunt claims of a flat, non-hierarchal, or democratic system go out the window. Eventually, a few entities will end up in control in a way that gives them significant power that individuals do not. But unlike the real world systems we have today, where governments can intervene when the distortions become too onerous, the current crop of defi stuff has no regulatory system to restore a kind of homeostasis when it becomes unbalanced. There is also nothing to be done if a critical security flaw is found (e.g. SHA found to be 'broken'). Thus the idea of basing a significant part of the world finance and information systems on top of blockchain to me seems both hideously wasteful and potentially catastrophic for society.