In practice, crypto markets are not any more decentralized than others. In real life people use hosted wallets on exchange platform. Transactions happen on a distributed (not decentralized!) ledger. The underlying network is only somewhat decentralized (the mining economy tends to the concentration of big players).
Also the way you seem to imagine we could be "removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc." just shows how much you don't know about how an economy works. Real-world transactions need to be reversible, need escrow, guarantees and a lot of other mechanisms that are by design not available using blockchains based assets (if they are there, it means the assumptions which would have made a blockchain useful have been broken, and that we can achieve the same features and services without a blockchain in a more efficient manner).
> In practice, crypto markets are not any more decentralized than others.
I specifically mentioned DEX, you are talking about CEX.
> Also the way you seem to imagine we could be "removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc." just shows how much you don't know about how an economy works.
So you are at lost of arguments and start questioning the argumenter pedigree instead? if you want to go that route: I have 15 years of experience in financial markets, am partner and founder in 2 (running) investments funds, trading equities, FX forwards, equity futures and interest rate swaps for ~1.5B AUM. I am currently a registered MIC on 5 accounts with the SFC (some of these including operational risk). I have setup multiple front office systems, work daily with middle office systems, and have a fairly good understanding of back office. I have worked extensively with clearing houses, most recently for the implementation of central clearing on interest rate products.
So please, explain me how you somehow have such a deep knowledge of these subjects that you can obviously see from my comment that I "don't know much about how finance works"?!
> Real-world transactions need to be reversible, need escrow, guarantees and a lot of other mechanisms that are by design not available using blockchains based assets
I will play your game: you have definitely 0 idea what exists in the crypto space. Everyting your mentions and much, much more already exists. The sophistication available on crypto contracts and protocols nowadays is at the very least on par with traditional finance entities and contrats, if beyond.
The parent mentions DEX volume, which tracks on-chain wallet usage, not what is being traded in a CEX.
> Real-world transactions need to be reversible, need escrow, guarantees and a lot of other mechanisms that are by design not available using blockchains based assets
Many blockchain transactions have reversibility, employ escrow, and have very strong cryptographic guarantees.
The only point of your post that is not easily refuted is: blockchain is not decentralized enough. But compared to what? Is Ethereum, open source software with many thousands of nodes and developers spread across the world, more or less centralized than the US dollar?
https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/articles/235171088-Cancel-Pa...
At the very minimum crypto showed that you can run an efficient, highly liquid, double digit billion dollar, fungible or non fungible exchange market in a fully automated and distributed manner.
A huge fiat equity market such as NYSE averages $3B/d, crypto DEXes alone is around $2B/d.
Crypto also completely removes the need for middle and back offices, clearing houses, etc. on these platforms.
Just technology wise (if we were to drop the self-sovereignty of crypto tokens and just use central bank backed crypto euro/dollar/etc to replace the current financial system) a monstrous amount of manpower and energy could be saved by removing the banks, exchanges, brokers, clearing houses, compensation chambers, back office, etc. industries.