I think, in hindsight, we should have known better, but I was probably too young and naive like everyone else: it's really a form on anarchism that tends to fly in the face of several realities.
One of them is that this kind of anarchism tends to quickly turn into a plutocracy.
If third parties want to regulate you, they will. So we've just added a layer of indirection that may be harder to manipulate by governments, great, but is manipulated by mining cabals and cryptomillionaires.
I don't mean to say it's all bad, there are very valid fringe use cases for cryptocurrencies. But it was never supposed to replace mainstream currency. The government is already a system for consensus, and frankly one that would be deeply unwise, to say the least, to throw away (in particular one in favor of money voting or mining voting). Specifically democracy is the best invention of mankind in my opinion.
(Weirdly enough, I think all big crypto thinkers have been trying to invent, using arcane cryptographic techniques and a lot of algorithms, something slightly (or significantly) worse than what we already have, which is a democracy where every real world individual is given a voting right. In their credit democracy is great, but it's already here, use it!)
