[whimsicalism]

Ethereum, like any financial instrument, has always been valued by willingness to pay. It is unavoidable that willingness to pay is impacted more by those with more wealth. You cannot sell an asset if nobody wants to buy it and people with money can buy things.

If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.

[ineedasername]

My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto.

All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems.

And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them.

It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.

[whimsicalism]

> My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto.

Yes, nobody ever suggested that irreversible transactions would make it easier to address fraud. You don't have a central entity to appeal to.

> All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field.

No, it does not agree with that. But the value of ethereum is determined by willingness to pay. There are not a "very small number" of actors with willingness to pay for ethereum.

Crypto is explicitly anti-democratic in that you cannot democratically (ie. by vote) decide to take away someone's asset.