Comment on [deleted]

Decentralizr@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• magic_lobster_party@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s mostly convenience. Most people buying cryptocurrency don’t really care about the decentralization aspect. They’re just in it for the quick buck.

  source
• Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Centralized exchanges were always inevitable, for a few basic reasons.

  As soon as crypto started getting big, it ran headlong into a fundamental problem;

  • The value proposition of cryptocurrencies is that one day they will be legitimate (“mass adoption is coming”); you need to get in now so that you’re a crypto millionaire when the world finally gets on board.
  • Without legitimacy, they might as well be monopoly money. There’s no reason why you can’t pay for things in monopoly money if the person receiving the money is cool with it, but at some point you hit that wall around your closed “monopoly money is cool” community.
  • Crypto is, fundamentally, very difficult for the average person to use. Trading one currency for another, for example, requires you to find a specific person who wants to sell exactly as much of that currency as you want to buy.
  • Centralised exchanges remove a lot of the friction from this process. They have (nominally) customer support teams and other things normies expect from a place where they’re being asked to store their life savings.
  • Without usability for the average idiot (not just bunch of weirdo hardcore nerds) crypto cannot get big. Without getting big crypto cannot get mass adoption. So no matter how much a bunch of elitist tech-nerds want to parrot “Not your keys”, the reality is that the entire project of making crypto meaningful was doomed to fail without centralised exchanges.

  But of course, it was also doomed to fail with centralised exchanges. Because the second reason why they exist is that even after you solve the usability problems with crypto, the growth is still limited, because there really aren’t that many people who are jazzed about buying into a hypothetical currency just because someday it might be a real boy. The engine was clearly running out of steam, and the exchanges needed to come up with “staking” to make people actually want to invest. And by “invest” we of course mean “throw their money into a Ponzi scheme” (look up the actual definition of a Ponzi, then look up how staking worked on every single exchange; the intention is irrelevant, the effect is a Ponzi whether it was meant to be or not).

  There’s no version of crypto that exists without centralized exchanges while still holding value outside of very limited, very niche spaces.

  source
• wafflez@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  name checks out

  source
• lobut@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not gonna lie, CZ was a great bullshitter. I’ve seen him do interviews and he was like, it’s better at Binance. What happens if you lose the keys? What happens if you die and your partner needs access?

  I thought those were good points even though they aren’t really compelling enough to me.

  Don’t question me further on this though. I’m not a crypto person.

  source

  • gila@lemm.ee ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Self-custody means retail customers interacting directly on-chain. I liken it to the difference between using a bank to send money vs. operating a bank which solely manages your own assets. With the former method, you have some consumer protections and the practical impact of any error you make isn’t realised immediately. You can contact the bank to resolve the issue, and they will have the opportunity (sometimes even an obligation) to do so. For the latter method, you are not protected as a consumer. The practical impact of mistaken transactions is irreversible, and is realised immediately. For crypto in particular, the transferred value doesn’t “go” anywhere, it simply disappears.

    source
• Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  You don’t, unless a currency of your trading pair is centralized (often dollars)

  source
• glockenspiel@programming.dev ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Huge CEX have huge liquidity. Probably why Binance got hit with failure to follow antimony laundering practices.

  Now, parking stuff there? Maybe ease. People are lazy and most are ill informed. Plus, CEX tend to offer other services such as staking or other ways to earn yield.

  Yeah you could go to a DEX. but there’s a lot of risk there. A lot in CEX too but I get why some might trust them more than fly by night DEX that are one bridge attack away from insolvency.

  source

  • Dozzi92@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Definitely lazy, but also fees for moving your currency. Keep it there and pay nothing, or move it for .00003btc, or gas fees, or whatever the hell else. I’m past my days of reading in random cryptos and it’s mainly because I hated needing a guide for accessing money.

    source