It seems like you have a very huge grudge against the current situation we are in right now. Though the answer relies already on your statement, "if you cannot beat them, join them." You might not followed this statement but as what I can see, you should somehow invest more than 4 dollars as we all know the fees on the Bitcoin network is comparatively higher than the other cryptocurrencies. That means that in order for us to really enjoy the profit from Bitcoin, we should acquire a little bit higher amount of it to avoid thinking about the huge fee. But this doesn't mean that Bitcoin is only for the rich or the "Central Bankers" as you said, you can acquire Bitcoin from top leading exchanges such as Binance and hold it there, you need not worry about huge transaction fee as fees will depend on the trading fee which is about 0.05% of the trades. Though the disadvantage of it is that, not acquiring the keys from the private key will not prove your ownership of your Bitcoins.
But somehow, centralized exchanges also care about their users and they also try their best to improve their security features.