> The world functioned without those things for much longer than we've had them. In the past, the only controls were whether new precious metal or other resource deposits were found.

The oldest forms of scripture we’ve found are mesopotamian clay tablets depicting the debts of people relative to eachother (John still needs to pay back Don for that ox he got last year). They were stored in temples and administered by the clergy... centrally.

Credit existed before currency and currency well before national markets or anything resembling modern economics.

  I think a deeper question to ask is whether the monetary 
  controls of which you speak are designed to serve the masses 
  or to maintain current power and wealth distribution?

Consider how all the major cryptocoin supplies have been minted and distributed. Anyone with established wealth has had disproportionately easier access to take over these cryptocoin networks due to the supplies being produced in quantity early on and at low computational/energy/capital costs.

Assuming the existing network is not made obsolete, and if there is any on-going demand then later users will need to sacrifice disproportionately excessive trade into the network as the early adopters simply horde the majority of the supply.

The difference is that it's a one-time upfront situation, whereas the current monetary systems in place have permanent ongoing rewards: the US federal reserve system where a select few chosen long ago have a permanent guaranteed income return that is written into law.

I'd rather have transparency and one-time benefit to a select few than a permanent, secretive benefit.

The US federal reserve system works pretty well and I don't really have a huge problem with it. My point is simply that the downsides to cryptocurrencies you rightly highlight have to be viewed in context of the current alternatives.

A large share of an asset which appreciates over time is a permanent ongoing reward. The effect of a conventional fractional reserve currency is the opposite; inflation erodes the value of currency holdings unless they're directly or indirectly invested in producing stuff (Sure, who has access to what investment opportunities isn't even and nor is the initial distribution of wealth, but cryptocurrency doesn't attempt to solve that problem)

  In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure 
  of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to 
  determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in 
  the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and 
  many addresses have been used only once or a few times. 
  (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small 
  exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from 
  early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, 
  another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 
  25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution 
  "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea 
  and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution 
  look like that of a workers' paradise

  Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 
  22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, 
  there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with 
  any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a 
  quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner 
  was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in 
  thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the 
  most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in 
  "RSA encryption")"

[1] "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain" via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard