The thing is that your use case can be likened to you and your friends coming together to play poker, so we need a system for allowing anyone to create a casino of any size.
As for what I meant by "bootstrapping":
Why do we have money, society, or any other social construct? It's because we as humans believe in some form of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".
Different cultures have different tradeoffs between these. And they may not recognize these things in people who don't look like them, or don't have the same gender, but the point is that this is the foundation of why we build social constructs such as government, police, and money.
The issues are complex, and sometimes contradictory, but this is what we bootstrap on.
Math is not that.
> for example, ownership of things like money accounts or even shares in group projects both come from and exist within our imagination, and crypto allows us to create rules and boundaries for those things
It does allow us to create those rules. But they are useless rules. Unless you think you can math-codify not only morality itself, but also exceptions and overrides.
And we don't know the exceptions until we encounter them.
Before we had DNA evidence we did not need to know what is "right" thing to do is, for someone who's just been proven innocent after 40 years. Not that we know now, either, but we have the mechanisms for trying, at least.
Blockchain enthusiasts want to make this impossible.
And that's why nobody will accept it. You think people are upset about the 1% now, imagine if it were literally impossible to change rules (laws, taxes, or anything else) that are clearly being exploited through a loophole.
It's the difference between mass surveillance and a proper legal court-approved search warrant.
This should not surprise you: People actually want search warrants to be a thing.
> I can't trust myself to know of or approve or appreciate the value of all of them.
Similarly you can't know the existence or value of all the things that a blockchain-based economy would make impossible.
Whereas the alternative (fiat currency) makes nothing impossible, as long as we can want it.