[morganvachon]

I think it's more to do with the creation of cryptocurrencies in the first place, not just using them. A thin client with no level of user control (i.e. everything you do with it is managed on servers controlled by your provider) cannot be used to create something as low level as a cryptocurrency, or indeed any form of low level development.

Of course, this kind of thing is why we will always have some form of generic, user-managed-hardware market. If you take away the tools used to create the apps and services controlled by the gatekeepers, you won't have any apps and services. To put it another way, Apple doesn't want to be responsible for creating the millions of apps in their store, they just want to be the ones in control of those apps. The workstation is not going away.