I have trouble imagining who might want to do this. It seems like a really small niche? Normal people don't need to trade or move large sums of money 24-7. An ATM and/or credit card is good enough.

I mean 24-7 comes for free. Security comes in some way for free as well. Large amount: its relative, so even for 10k USD you would pay 100 USD as fee. You get similar fees for purchasing stocks and many have more then 100k in equity. So it isn't really a small niche. Rather a huge market that may get more simple and cheap through DeFi.

The major brokerages have let you buy and sell stocks for free for a couple years now. (Not just Robinhood, though they started it.)

Ok maybe in the us. Anyway are you sure it is really free in regards that they don't give you a worse price or won't execute if things move in the wrong direction like Robinhood did...? My point is, its just inconvenient for me to rely on a third party without able to enter the "true" market on myself.

The question is, worse price than what? In the US you’re supposed to get at least the best price quoted at any stock exchange, the “nationally best bid and offer” (NBBO). Surprisingly, you can often do better, but this is still a good price. I don’t think you can easily do that with cryptocurrency where you normally only trade at one exchange?

Maybe relying on a third party is useful if they can get you better prices without needing accounts with all the exchanges? And brokerages normally give you a better price than any exchange. This is called price improvement. [1]

Robinhood got in trouble for falsely claiming that they get better prices than their competitors and not disclosing that they get payment for order flow, but their customers still got the NBBO I think? Although see [2].

People make a big deal about payment for order flow because they don’t like the idea of someone else making money off them, but that doesn’t mean you got a bad price.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceimprovement.asp

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/matt_levine/status/13594921198162...

Actually you can do it for cryptocurrencies as well. There are a lot of aggregators that execute or split your order across different exchanges.

As you said yourself, brokers may offer somehow better prices. My point is just, it is not possible to interact directly with the exchange, even if it maybe for some people more convenient to use a broker. There is no free lunch, more third parties means in my opinion worse price or higher fees.

You'd think that, but apparently retail customers get better prices because market makers are more likely to lose money trading against a professional who knows something is coming, and the smaller spread from lower risk for them is enough to pay for the business model. They still make money on the spread but it's lower.

It's a bit weird that it works that way, but there is a logic to it. Price discrimination can work in your favor.

(And having gotten many literally free lunches from an employer, there is no harm to it if you know why they do it.)

Got it. Sounds interesting. Just one remark about it, europe seems to be banning practices related selling the order flow. As you said it sounds a bit weird. Lets say non transparent. So maybe you don't always get a good deal.

PS: Crypto isn't always better in this regard since, there are some frontrunners and so on. The difference is that it is completely transparent.

GAS fees are nuts.

This is still mostly restricted to those living in the USA. It's also only a fraction of the investment market too, to invest in higher risk things such as startups you need to already have a net worth of $2M or make $250k/year+ which is only the top 1% of people. I'd like to see a lot more democratization of finance than that.

> your bank can block your assets as well as your government

It wasn't until recently that governments (arguably) became good at using technology to physically regulate banking activity, and it's only because the financial system became centralized enough for them to gain visibility into what was going on. Before then, and - to be honest, even now - government regulation was operationalized through the threat of repercussions and consequences for non-compliance.

Aside from reducing visibility into the transactions themselves, I don't understand what, exactly, DeFi or any of the other acronyms for ledger based systems do to stop this. Does DeFi, crypto, or whatever it's being called at the moment make it easier to avoid government oversight? Sure, but if you are doing something illegal in the process and get caught, there will still be legal repercussions.

> hard to transfer LARGE sums cheaply... fees are sometimes very high as well. Example tried to convert one currency to an other 1% fees in europe. I think you would pay less in a DeFi setup.

Is this still true? I'm pretty (very) sure that Interactive Brokers and other platforms allow for extremely cost effective currency transfers.

1% is true, for a lot of banks in my country. IB may be an exception, without going into details I had trouble with their kyc.

DeFi is a buzz word. Lets take Uniswap. You get direct access to an exchange. It works 100% of the time. You pay the same fees as everybody else. Traditional exchanges: try to get the same fees as a HFT shops. Yeah forget it. Even through IB you don't get direct participation on the exchange. So in my perspective the traditional system is kind of rigged in the way how different actors are able to participate. At least at the moment DeFi is fair in this regard. Also you get full access to the assets you are holding without any third party..