"Seems feeble?" You can go on about implementation details, UX flaws, problems with the state of crypto today - but what's been mathematically obvious since Bitcoin's inception is that the right ledger is both permanent and open enough to disregard issues of trust (you could say it has infinite trust, which is an exaggeration, but in a practical sense this is how its used without blemish), and that governments and central parties are easily corruptible and capable of cheating in ways so as to never get caught or noticed.

You either know very little about cryptography and game theory or very little about government to be asserting such doubt. Crypto-currencies have many problems, but finding ones where trust can be taken for granted is trivial.