the author recognizes and appreciates the successes we've had, but his point is that while things aren't as good as they could be using crypto instead of organizing and doing "the work" is not going to solve things. if nothing else because you'll end up with the same centralized control at some point or suffer while the system tries to self correct (if it even could). it is all a distributed system already so making another system, with higher built in costs, does not solve the problem.