"But passivity also created risk. If there was a problem with the code, someone could exploit it directly, without needing to bypass any human safeguards. And limiting blockchain interactions to cut costs entailed a trade-off: When a smart contract—a script that executes automatically when certain criteria are met—has fewer steps, it can leave more room for security vulnerabilities."

So much of this reminds me of Chesterton's Fence, where "innovative" solutions are deployed by people who never put forth the time and effort to fully understand how the existing system came to be the way that it was - and the problems that it had to deal with and solve along the way.

I'm not trying to sing the praises of finance and banking; there's much there that is broken. (I'm also not a fan of crypto or NFTs.) But I am saying that many of the "old" ways came about in response to a litany of problems that are neither obvious nor intuitive, and you need to understand why it works the way it does before putting out a new solution.