Innovation isn't what's needed, it's regulation. Making an alternative that does a couple things better but a thousand things worse isn't going to turn a broken market into a free one.
There are multiple types of decentralization and the one we need for finance isn't the "everyone is (theoretically) equal and there are no rules" of crypto but the "distributed network of trusted providers" that we use for things like public key infrastructure and email. People WILL get hacked, lose their wallets, etc. so recovery MUST be possible and like it or not, law enforcement SHOULD have the power to freeze accounts and take back money that doesn't belong to someone.
I believe cyptocurrency has the potential to do everything a 1000 times better.
Take security: with natively programmatic money, security providers can be debundled from currency issuers and payment providers. For example with smart contract wallets it's possible to assign your own guardians which act as security backups and who need to approve all transactions, based on whatever conditions you set, e.g. m of n need to sign to approve >x amount withdrawn within y time frame.
This massively opens the space for competition which inevitably increases quality and efficiency.
It's the same with the security of data: the centralized finance approach has all customer data stored by one party. If that party is compromised, you have a massive leak affecting millions of different people. With programmatic money, digital commerce can work like cash, with no private information disclosed at all, to any one, and no private data being collected in large centralized repositories.
There are also basic institutional advantages with programmatic money on autonomous networks: the rules cannot be changed without consensus, so a rent-seeking party cannot use the network's monopoly status to extract economic rent. A centralized authority, like a regulator or a private company, can always abuse monopolistic control over an industry, meaning that risk will always hang over traditional industries, making them unreliable in the long run.
I'm no apologist for corporate power, but most payment network censorship seems to be driven by government regulations - Wikileaks, sex work, weed, and gambling are all things the government has passed laws to explicitly harm. As such, additional regulation is more likely to cement the current restrictions rather than repudiate them.
