A lot of people in the space made a lot of money a couple years back (on what was a bubble) but that means they are now are set for life and can dedicate themselves fully to working on the tech, and its all starting to click together.
You don't have to buy into it with your money if you dont want too, you can still explore the tech.
https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/ https://gitcoin.co/
In reality, just about every DeFi platform is not trustless nor are the usecases possible in a trustless way. Uniswap is one exception that comes to mind.
The parallel is that you can have the existing financial systems replicated on Bitcoin, Ethereum, with some additional properties and tradeoffs. I don't think you could make that kind of comparison with ham radio?
While this is true in these early days where developers need the ability to upgrade contracts and quickly fix bugs it is not the long term state of these projects and all of the major ones have defined paths to full decentralization. It's important to note that even today all of these services are non-custodial which is already a huge step up from the status quo. The amount of centralization is also variable with some projects able to upgrade certain portions of their systems but not all of it and other projects simply having an emergency kill switch they can use in case of a critical bug but can't actually change the contract.
It's definitely not perfect right now but it's already better than traditional systems with things becoming more trustless over time. Eventually these services will be as fixed as Uniswap/Balancer/etc as things get more stable.
Ditto on the non custodial claims, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen this term used to describe a product and for it to actually be the case.
They are very relevant to the discussion as stablecoins will be the primary way people interact with decentralized services and decentralized stablecoins retain the decentralized and trustless properties that make BTC and ETH valuable.
https://bitflate.org/post/2020/03/14/the-problem-with-dai.ht...
>Crazy price gyrations are far too wicked for the regular money-using public to tolerate
This is what stablecoins such as DAI and USDC are for. People will use stablecoins for their everyday lives as it's built for being a medium of exchange.
>It's too awkward for most people
This is still true to an extent but most people would have no problem using Argent.
Average people need easy to use savings accounts. Easy ways to save and invest their money for the future. One click ways to purchase products. These can't happen on Bitcoin but they already exist on Ethereum and DeFi. All possible in a trustless way.
There's a lot of development happening on web3 right now but if you focus entirely on Bitcoin you will miss the important parts of what make this space interesting.