While I favor "distributed all the things" from a political/ideological perspective, it indeed carries massive performance and utility tradeoffs, compared to centralized solutions, and is very difficult to sell to end users without a critical mass of adoption / network effects.
Moreover, as BTC mining consolidation demonstrates, it's certainly possible that distributed systems tend to devolve to quasi-centralized systems with extra steps (Exhibit B: GitHub massively dominating the "distributed" git ecosystem).
> the private banking and consumer finance space has been doing an acceptable job so far
...really? Can I join you in your alternate universe? :) The fact that none of the consumer payment systems (PayPal/Venmo/etc) interoperate with one another is nothing short of embarrassing in 2020. Or the fact that ACH doesn't operate on weekends or holidays, as though all transactions were still processed by humans working M-F 9-5. And that's saying nothing of the missed opportunity for smart money / smart contracts to be baked into USD itself.
We don't need blockchains to upgrade money; just government mandates/incentives for standardized APIs to be implemented by banks and user-facing applications.
