> Until we find the API for reality, many of these decentralized projects are hopeless.

That was nicely put. I see so many of these projects promising to end with banking, bureaucracy, but forgetting that at some level the bits and bytes have to be input or acted on by a human.

In some ways it's like the early days of banks, where flaws like this were found and fixed. However a lot of those fixes were put in place by governments and regulation with the threats of prison time and fines for both banks and their customers.

Another question is if things like this will poison the well and scare people away permanently.

It's almost like an authority is needed to enforce contracts. This decentralization for the sake of being decentralized doesn't solve the problem fully.

The difference is that the "early days of banking" were the 1200's CE (and arguably way before then). And even then, it took 800 years to really nail it down and finally get away from fiat currency. For some reasons none of this applies to crypto because reasons that definitely aren't a pump-and-dump.