[AndrewStephens]

I should have made myself clearer - none of that (agents, lawyers, etc) exists in crypto _apart_ from the exchanges, which are meant to facilitate the transfer of crypto assets.

The two problems with this setup are:

* The exchanges are dishonest and unregulated.

* The exchanges are exploding like a chain of firecrackers.

So crypto is going from a state of having most transactions go through dishonest exchanges to being in a state where people own crypto but trading will become almost impossible.

Is the price going to go up? Will it go down? It doesn't matter, since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything.

[datadata]

Exchanges don't need to act as long duration custodians for them to serve their purpose or be profitable. Exchanges will make a profit from trading fees. They can attract capital and liquidity via market maker fee rebates. You can trickle your capital through an exchange to make a large trade incrementally and only ever risk an arbitrarily small percentage of your total capital. There are ways to run exchanges in a much less sketchy way, that while not perfect, would make the kind of horrific abuse of customer funds that FTX did not possible. For example, merkle tree proof of reserves.

[rglullis]

> since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything

Before repeating your baseless argument, please read about my project. Start with the about page. Understand that we can have global commerce with crypto without the big centralized exchanges. It's only an issue of scaling down and accepting that even though "trust" is needed for efficient transactions, this can happen at a much lower level.