I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard

I hear you and don't exactly disagree, but I don't always agree that a P2P decentralized model is inevitably better served by centralized people making the hard decisions that make good business sense. There are different incentives in play, and some of them push towards centralization with a profit motive, some of them push towards decentralization with a profit motive and some of them push towards pure decentralization without a profit motive. Where the crypto space remains a cesspool of failed projects and snake oil it's usually because someone sold one as the other and no one understood (or cared as long as they were in the right part of the pyramid) about it. I'm not 100% sure that Helium didn't have an actual use case that could have made sense for some applications far better than say Verizon doing the same thing. Whether that was ultimately the intention of the people involved at the core or whether it could have happened in the token/crypto/ponzi/flipper domain, I don't know. I have seen a lot of decentralized models that may have made sense in a certain domain get crushed under the pressure of some people getting rich quick or using a business model for taken speculation.