Not sure why this is downvoted. It’s clear if you spend time at the right conferences, read the right papers, and talk to the right people that $billions can eventually be saved and risk massively reduced / much better understood and managed, if not by the specific “DeFi” protocols people are using on Ethereum now, then by the things that will come to follow them. The potential upside for the bets that come good is worth a lot of losers — VC is very asymmetrical. Maybe this will all fail but there aren’t many good arguments why. (Yes, you can build all the fraud protection, account recovery, regulatory compliance features that you might need into these systems when the time comes, if that’s what it takes to realise the other benefits — arguments about this are at least 5 years too early.)

I remember when building on or investing in Linux was a waste of time because it was a toy and would never be used for anything serious. The truth is, things are still very early — the internet has its roots in the 1960s, we are perhaps where the internet was sometime in the ‘80s with crypto (still an accelerated timeline!). Be very cautious of extrapolating from what can be done now (in crypto, quantum computing, biotech, AI, wherever). Unless you’ve spent months or years researching and piecing things together and know what is actually possible, it’s just possible that there are aspects that you don’t fully appreciate.