[dredmorbius]

Maybe some reliance on authority is a good thing?

Because the answer crytpocurrency provides to "how much are you willing to pay to never have to trust anyone" is "one hell of a lot" via work-factor.

A fundamental characteristic of all exchange systems is trust. That may not be institutional trust, but there is trust in something: mineral scarcity and assayability, counterparty, commodity-currency acceptability by others, pricing and exchange systems, recourse options, etc.

In economics, there's a long observation that high-trust markets and the societies in which they exist perform vastly better than low-trust ones. And interestingly, cryptocurrency fairly neatly segregates markets into those who do have fundamental trust in institutions and practices, and those who do not.