Very true, and the same was true for IT companies in the 90s/early 2000s.

Still, I'd say investing in IT stock is accessible for the layman today. Part of this is just that it's early days and we're right now in the midst of a cambrian explosion.

The interface to use MakerDAO (one of the defi projects mentioned) is a lot more straightforward than any bank I've ever used or had to deal with. Sure there are more complicated defi projects, but over time: a) they get more user-friendly, b) users become more educated.

It'll eventually be abstracted to where it's simple to be used by regular folks, or it'll be integrated into existing infrastructure.

Yup, I don't understand how a lot of traditional financial instruments work but I still use them. At least these are transparent.

That's one thing that I've really enjoyed so far - a lot of these projects are essentially lego bricks, and I can (and do) try and understand how all of the different pieces fit together. That's something that certainly isn't possible with a lot of traditional finance. Even if I wanted to figure it out, I don't have access to see everything.

Speaking of lego bricks, and I haven't used it yet myself, but https://furucombo.app/ looks really interesting!

I've played around with it a bit. I actually found a juicy arbitrage opportunity, and was trying to use it to chain a few trades together to take advantage. Unfortunately it didn't support one of the trading platforms I needed to use, so I ended up just manually making the transactions separately.

This really drove home how inefficient and full of opportunities Ethereum is if you know where to look.

Learning about flash loans and how they settle in the same transaction that they originated in really made the idea of the lego bricks click for me, it was like a light bulb moment.