A tiny fraction of users of a system with minimal real-world impact do not have much leverage. As we’ve seen, most crypto users are comfortable using exchanges and there’s no reason to think that will change. The majority of users are speculators who are thinking about returns and don’t seem bothered by control accumulating in a few companies or mining pools.

Re: spam, think a bit longer about that — how much spam do people get in email versus Facebook or Twitter? Those platforms have a lot of users who value their control of user signups, monitoring, and ability to arbitrarily remove spam messages after delivery.

Email is one of the most distributed systems in the world but a rather large fraction of users self-centralized on Gmail. That wasn’t just spam control but I think it’d be really useful to think about why some new system wouldn’t follow the same arc: if your argument is “cyberpunks wouldn’t accept it”, remember that we had that ethos arguably even stronger back then and it didn’t have the predicted effect.