You're both right.

Hard money only would impose a structural obstacle that can still be overcome to achieve nefarious goals like war. But it's not a silver bullet for solving problems caused by our innate tendencies:

Humanities biggest strengths (tribalism, empathy, cooperation) are also its biggest weaknesses (groupthink, weaponization of emotions, systemic overshoot). Technology *could* change that because it codes behavior. But that would require software (culture) to override hardware (above mentioned tendencies hardcoded into our genes). 

The only way you could achieve this is by literal brainwashing of civilizations with new objectives overriding our evolutionary ones. The Culture by Bainks is a good fictional example of this. North Korea comes closest to a real-world example, albeit a distorted one.

Hard money alone is just a one tool in a hypothetical set of tools that would be needed to fix this. 

 The best cache refresh is a complete crash of the operating system. 

It cannot and will not happen without a complete delegitmization of the old financial system.

Ideas die only after they haven been defeated by a superior idea and caused enough suffering in the process for people to move on. Example: nazism (crushingly defeated as an idea that caused loads of suffering) and communism (took much longer to defeat, suffering not present in the minds of Western people).

Fiat replaced gold because those in charge disproportionately benefit from it. Thus, it will not simply be driven out by a superior tech stack because those in charge have disproportionately much control over its removal. 

Bitcoin has to prove itself superior as a tech stack AND idea to be widely accepted as currency, and not just SoV. Currently, Bitcoin cannot even fully convince its proponents of its tech stack, see security model discussion. 

 That's all well and true but it sounds like you think people want a change. I don't think that's the case. Practically nobody makes the connection between "the system is rigged" and "our monetary technology is to blame for it". So regulators have all the time in the world. 

 Not some but most. If bitcoin replaced fiat as a base layer and LN/other L2s worked as custodial scaling solutions, that would already be a massive improvement.

But that's light years away.