With money though there's still someone who needs to make it "money". It's printed, its supply is controlled, its integrity is enforced. Otherwise it's just paper with numbers on it.

With crypto all of this is taken care of by the network, and with the truly decentralized networks (not all of them are) anyone can be part of the network. No one "owns" the ledger. In my mind this has successfully created something that is more free (as in speech) than any previous form of "money" other than gold.