The future of finance is decentralized, this has nothing to do with what people will choose to put their money into individually but the base layer of financial management has "self-custody" written all over it.
It isn't something everyone is going to fancy, that's for sure, those that cannot carry the cross of self management will have to employ people to do it, but it is inevitable that the world will be largely involved in the new investment platform - crypto.
Regulation is a lost battle
The regulation of crypto assets is something we've been discussing quite recently but not a lot of people seem to understand that what we call crypto is just a piece of code written in different programming languages across the industry.
One of the major outcomes of regulation will be its inevitable role in making product, service of project developers to stay anonymous and consistently build infrastructures that enhance that. Anonymity is a human right because at the very basic, it is an approach taken by individuals to attain privacy and not be IDed by every single organization out there.
Ones and Zeros
The government is bad at math when it comes to practicalization so who's to say they will ever be able to understand crypto? They are yet to even understand how the computer works.
If I build a web application, I didn't do anything much other than write a couple of ones and zeros so however anyone else translates this written number structure and leverages it, really isn't my business.
Upon creation, I understand that a lot of people won't understand this, I also understand that the majority that will understand it won't be interested in it, so the few that will decide to actually work or act on this numbers are so narrowed down that it becomes evident that the choice is from an independent point of view and examination.
But all of this is just long talk to simply tell you that:
Smart contracts are the government's worst nightmare
The words smart contracts sound so foreign most times that people believe it's actually foreign but it's all really nothing more than simply lines of code that responds to predefined rules, talk about the majority of the internet yeah?
Numerous digital structures are already functioning on smart contracts but it's often just labeled "automation" and the fact that the system is centralized at the top makes the concept of "smart contracts" not majorly spoken of there.
Surely, the absence of finance in most of these structures also plays a role, but what's there to note is that smart contracts are effectively crypto's ticket to exclusion from shit laws that the government will try to cook up.
First of all, crypto isn't money at creation, it isn't the USD Dollar or the Pounds, it's merely a piece of code. So the fact that people begin to accept these pieces of code as a medium of exchange is really not something that can be regulated become how are you going to tell me what I should accept as value for my product or service? You must be delusional to think you'd ever actually succeed in doing that.
Then again, smart contracts will enable this ecosystem to build various structures that will be exempted from laws because you know, it's just a code, there's no dollar on my code, just crypto which isn't even money either, just code. The fact that people actually use any of these things is not my problem, those are individual decisions.
The more you think of it, the more you realize there's no controlling what people do that really cause no harm to others.
You cannot regulate a piece of code, that's like attempting to regulate the internet and that's just bullshit.