We are not talking about capital; we are talking about access. It is undeniably true that access to the legacy financial network is permissioned. But your Ethereum transactions and your smart contracts are no less privileged than those of Goldman Sachs. And if you can create a protocol that generates interest on your users capital, they just might entrust your smart contracts with a billion dollars worth of assets.
This is not speculative; it's the reality today. The reason why you keep hearing about all those DeFi hacks is because random people are building financial infrastructure (interacting with financial protocols built by other random people) without having to ask for anyone's consent or approval, and anyone in the world can use these products.
You can say that this is a terrible idea, but to say that it isn't something new that blockchain has enabled is simply denial.
(Crazy but true: under the EU's "Open Banking" API initiative, you are not even able to access your own account data in read-only mode, without going through a third party provider; it's only "open" to regulated entities.)
> No it does not and no it is not, this is more terribly wrong mythical thinking that I hear people repeating. The design is not set in stone and there is no "nature" to it.
The claim is not that there is no design space; the claim is that you are bounded by what we simply might call physical reality. You can design your messenger with end to end encryption, or without it, and that decision may be influenced by your value system. However, the decision might impose restrictions on how you can approach the problem of making multiple devices work, or a chat history, or interoperability.
If you want to make it impossible for regulators to censors the financial protocols written by random teenagers (the design requirement), but you also want certain actors to be able to revert transactions, then you may find that those two goals are in tension with each other.