[dragonwriter]

> So anyone who thinks that there should be public distributed protocols for exchanging money is a hopeless idealist and just making things worse.

No, anyone who thinks people should exclusively directly make use of “public distributed protocols” is a hopeless idealist.

They aren't “making things worse”, though, except from the perspective of their own hopeless ideal.

> So I guess in your opinion it would be better if digital transactions just continued to go through monopoly private middlemen.

It can't be both “middlemen” and “monopoly”; it's at worst an oligopoly. And, no, I didn't say that. But more competing low-level payment networks makes middlemen that can abstract them more valuable to most consumers and merchants.