> A whale liquidating lots of BTC sounds like a sweet bargain to me.

This is my point, it’s all me, me, me. What about the people that lose everything. And what about when it’s no longer a situation of “only invest what you can afford to lose” rather that’s the currency you get paid in and it’s regularly subjected to pump and dump schemes. That’s not a system of currency, much less a democratization of money.

The entire defi system is currently set up for people to literally act as vultures and skim money from liquidity pools staked by others. NFTs are effectively money laundering schemes mixed with guerrilla marketing consisting of fake collectors, self purchases/self dealing, and more pump and dump scams.

Imagine some senior citizen just trying to pay rent, buy groceries and pay for meds fiddling with the most user friendly centralized wallets much less managing their own private key and setting gas. They fact is there are whales and they are sophisticated persons/organizations (if not live neural nets/bots trading on their behalf with unlimited capital and liquidity seeking to scrap profits by manipulating the prices) they certainly aren’t the unbanked which is another bs marketing scheme of the technology.

At some point it has to become obvious that there is no new opportunity for the non-technical, relatively powerless person. They are the food for the already powerful in this situation, as things currently stand. I know people in exactly this situation: older musicians and sound engineers on a discussion forum who clearly aren't up to speed on the mechanics of how all this works. The only redeeming factor I can see is that they're into POS instead of POW crypto, but they seem to have little idea of how fees and things work, and they're elderly musicians who're on the whole already not wealthy, and crypto is gonna take the last thousand dollars from some of these guys and leave 'em destitute.

When you talk about putting these sorts of things into the reach of the non-technically savvy, it seems we are generally NOT also talking about not predating upon them savagely. Instead we get Facebook and the like: we get mechanisms to consume those people, that being the point. Not great.

I think that's a very important point. Contrast cryptocurrencies to free software. The free software activists intended to give every user more power, to let anyone modify and share the software they use.

But crypto is different. Instead of empowering everybody, it replaces one concentration of power (old money and fed) with another (new money and whales). So naturally, the arguments in favor are increasingly of the type "this will be good for me": support crypto so that you, too, can carve out your part. Or don't and "have fun being poor" (i.e. left out of the concentration of power).

If crypto were about empowering everybody, it would consider pump-and-dumps in particular and preferential attachment in general to be bugs, not features. But it doesn't, not as long as number go up.