[pavlov]

Crypto was supposed to liberate you from the traditional banksters. Instead it’s an impenetrable smokescreen where you’ve got uninsured credit risk with institutions in Silicon Valley and the Bahamas and who knows where, and you won’t know until the edifice cracks and your money is stuck. Not a terrific improvement.

Of course the Bitcoin maximalists will shake their heads, mutter about self-custody, and then go on conducting their actual finances in dirty fiat because Bitcoin is nearly impossible to use for anything that people actually want to do.

[blululu]

Don’t have any horses in this race, but this feels like a straw man. Getting told to go die by a centralized exchange is exactly the kind of problem that crypto solves. The trouble is a ton of web3 startups (like coinbase) worked to undo this feature to improve usability. Pretty much every crypto person I know who has been in it for more than 5 years will insist no keys no coins. A lot of the innovation in web3 consisted of pulling back the decentralization inherent in a lot of blockchains.

[jeroenhd]

I think the "no keys, no coins" crowd definitely has the right idea, but the existence of cryptocurrency exchanges is a sign that for many people decentralisation isn't usable enough just yet. These exchanges hold billions exactly because using these currencies just like real money isn't practical enough, or isn't the intended target of the people trading in them.

I think cryptocurrencies suffer from the fact most people seem to use them purely for speculation. I can't remember the last time I've paid by cash but I've never seen any store accept USDC or Dogecoin or anything else. Some online stores used to take cryptocurrencies but they've all stopped as far as I can tell.

Mayne this isn't true in other countries. I can imagine people in Argentina or Turkey or Venezuela using cryptocurrencies because their official currency is even less stable than your average cryptocoin and because foreign currencies often become available in limited numbers when banks struggle to contain their slipping currencies, basically sidestepping the government or the banking system. I haven't seen any evidence for it, though.