> The wild west no existing power structure idea is
Let me stop you right there. Decentralization isn't about no power structures, it's about decentralized power structures.
Let's say you walk into the barn, slit a goat's throat, and throw it on the back of your horse to ride off back to your camp. I shoot you dead.
In the Wild West, no one really knows how everyone will react. Who cares about you? Who cares about me? Who cares about the goat? Who else has guns?
In capitalism, everyone knows what will happen. The owner of the goat will summon the (centralized) state to track me down, extract what value it can, and punish me.
In a decentralized system, everyone already knows exactly why you are dead. They take note, and the go back to their work. They know my family almost starved last year. They know we were relying on that goat to survive. They know I consider any attack on that goat to be an attack on my family. They know that everyone in town except for Jeff also agrees that an attack on the goat is a violent attack on me. They know that except for three people, everyone believes I'm justified in using capital violence against someone who would kill that goat. Two of those three, Betty and Jun, think I should use violence, but everyone knows they also won't use violence against me. The third is your cousin, who is rarely around since they're drunk most of the time. If they were to come around, at least 14 other townspeople would defend me to the death, because this was a posted, cut and dry case of self defense for that many.
Everyone already knows these things because they've opted into thousands of organizational structures over time that distribute information about what around them people need, what people believe, and why they believe it.
Not everyone needs to know this information at all times, but everyone is familiar with how to get it, and it's there to see at any time. Not always published openly, but distributed through a web of trust so that it's accessible where it needs to be.
> Decentralization exists when a small enough community can be self-policing and actors have noble goals
Bitcoin proves that wrong. Bitcoin has actors with non-noble goals, and is a quite large community.
Christmas is another example. Lots of people have non-noble goals with respect to Christmas, and it's a huge community, and yet it seems to soldier on just fine without any real central control.
> This is even worse in the blockchain system because it's so intrinsically tied to wealth.
You are still thinking of the blockchain as "just currency". It's not. It's a decentralized banking system.
Let's say I want to rent shares in sheep in my sheep farm. You are thinking I need wealth to buy bitcoins with so I can run a bitcoin business with my sheep. Not true.
If I have four sheep, and I want to do quarter shares... I just need 16 satoshi, or $0.0001 (and a phone).
Now I can issue shares in those sheep that can be traded and cryptographically verified. That's banking. I made a bank. For a hundredth of a penny.
Bitcoin is not valuable because of the wealth it contains, it is valuable for the ways in which it can facilitate financial transactions. The market cap of BTC is the total number of dollars that you could trade it for, which is related to the amount of money needed to float pending transactions, plus some speculative value.
But that's an average according to the market, it doesn't necessarily reflect the value of Bitcoin to any specific individual. The value of Bitcoin to you is what you can do with it. And you don't have to be wealthy to do things with Bitcoin that you used to need a banker to do for you. And you do need to be wealthy to get a banker to do something for you.
> Ethereum is the defacto dictator of their ecosystem and they've exercised that right several times.
OK, let's think about three words we might use to describe Ethereum: Dictatorship, Anarchism, Democrasy.
1) Miners on the main branch have voted several times to make a hard fork. The branch didn't fork until they voted for it. Unless you think those votes were fraudulent, I'd say that looks a lot like democrasy.
2) The old branches still exist! Ethereum Classic is the entire Ethereum universe, except people voted no on the forks. It's even supported on exchanges. That is what anarchism looks like. When someone makes a decision, only the people who agree go along with them.
3) The Ethereum Foundation, and core members of the community form a kind of cultural center of mass, where they have a lot of influence when they speak up, and they know the code better than most, and they have access to information quicker than others in the community. In this sense, they have a vague kind of dictatorial control. They can attempt to wield undue influence.
Honestly though, that's as much a dictatorship as Goldman Sachs is a dictatorship over the U.S. Which... it's kind of true, if I squint my eyes, I'll give you that. But #1 and #2 are actually reasonable high level characterizations of the basic political systems. #3 is at best an interesting metaphor.