Human intervention is required more than you might think in the current banking system. Mistakes, fat fingered numbers, wrong accounts etc. None of it is resolved without humans with authority.
Unless you can build an authority into the system somehow for dispute resolution, the system will always favour bad actors and fraud.
The big push for no-authority, decentralised finance sounds wonderful, but the reality is if the system is inherently biased toward fraud and crime because of a lack of dispute resolution, fraud and crime is what you are going to get.
1. I wonder how much of this still holds in a potential future world where machines are making decisions in most aspects of life already.
2. It doesn't follow that you can't have some recognized authorities within decentralized finance to negotiate fallback cases. For instance, the role of banks could become merely to supply information related to human authentication, not most of market operation.
I guess you could set it up that way, but then you create the problem of competing authorities - it's the same problem that the internet has with DNS. At some point, it has to have a single source of truth. The blockchain itself isn't enough when what is recorded on the blockchain is potentially not what the actors intended (or is what a criminal intended in a fraud scheme).
Competing authorities seem like a feature not a bug. It allows for experimentation and evolution of governance models. International law works this way and is what allows people to “vote with their feet”. There is no actual requirement for a single source of truth.
Unless you can build an authority into the system somehow for dispute resolution, the system will always favour bad actors and fraud.
The big push for no-authority, decentralised finance sounds wonderful, but the reality is if the system is inherently biased toward fraud and crime because of a lack of dispute resolution, fraud and crime is what you are going to get.