Working in finance made me extremely cynical about anything that claims to “democratize” finance. It’s a great idea, as you say, in theory; but in practice what gets branded as “democratization” is really selling retail investors on the table scraps that professionals have already picked over.
It's hard to get money to be productive. It's hard to get a financial system to do anything other than gamble, pump and dump, scam, and make bubbles.
The problem with cryptocurrency is that it is inherently separate from the real economy, and difficult to use for direct investment into real world innovation or productivity. Right now, new money creation in cryptocurrency goes mainly into digital asset speculation, resulting in periodic bubbles, and then failures of centralized crypto businesses like FTX, Celsius, etc.
Crypto is the ultimate example of financial anarchy. A sector born from online fraud, metastasizing in its peak off of fad investors setting government transfer payments on fire.
Real businesses,, business that have value and add value to the world are not built by bros in suits yelling at eachother on Wallstreet. Businesses are built by the Hank Hill types wearing Levi's and showing up to work in snowstorms and summer heat to load trucks and weld iron. Value isn't created by a stock ticker, it's created with the blood sweat and tears of the common person. Finance bros do not know how to bleed, sweat or cry - so they can't make things of real value.
Case and point, Warren Buffet.
But the rest of the economy has been making people's lives better for thousands of years. Would you rather live now, or a hundred years ago? a hundred years ago or 200 years ago? repeat till you're satisfied with my argument. If you hit any snags, just repeat a few times more.
There's also the issue of the "business cycle". Why do we have recessions? What can be done about them? Can we mitigate the damage of crashes? Not a solved problem.