Your parents will never have a custodial wallet. The fact that traditional banking is easier than 'doing crypto right' should give you all the adoption metrics you need.
Don't do that if you want to actually own your coins.
No, it is you who missed the point yet again. If you give your crypto to Coinbase it isn't your crypto anymore. You are entrusting Coinbase with your crypto. FDIC insurance may be helpful if your bank has financial difficulties, but any money you entrust to the bank can be seized just as easily as Coinbase can seize your money. Ask a truck driver who participated in the lockdown protests in Ottowa how secure their fiat money was in the bank after it was unilaterally seized by the government.
> The fact that traditional banking is easier than 'doing crypto right' should give you all the adoption metrics you need.
Does anyone go into crypto because it is "easier" than traditional banking?
Even if you have a private wallet, you don't 'own' your own crypto.
When the Solana network was down [0], could the people that 'own' their own wallets trade their crypto? What about the people with their coins on an exchange?
A recent example is Solana. Their network keeps crashing [0]. Everyone keeping their own keys are completely locked away from trading their coin. Everyone with their coin owned in a centralized exchange can trade freely.
If you hold your own coins, you're vulnerable to network attacks and AMM instability/hacks.
If you put the coins on an exchange, you're vulnerable to the exchange's liquidity issues.
How much downtime did Terra have before it crashed?
Bitcoin you can hold it, transfer it, and not much more. Having smart contracts (like Ethereum) allows you to have something like Uniswap, which is decentralized and allows you to trade your coins.
Yes, it's not a fiat on/offramp, but if stablecoins are actually good and backed, in the scenarios you describe you would just buy/sell stablecoins and at a later point exchange those stables for cash.
In contrast, crypto is this almost futuristic mechanism that centers developers by giving you a serverless transactional database system on which you not only can work with money but you can implement your own money. I can build my own mechanisms for authenticating access to that money, including--if I wanted to--replicating whatever features I liked from traditional systems. It offers functionality similar to ACH and wire transfers, but as a truly federated system that allows anyone to participate. Does it allow scams? Sure... but only in the same sense that other open systems like telephone networks, e-mail, and the web allow people to run scams! Are you really so closed minded as to not think everyone should get the power to automate their own lives as they see fit? God... I bet you are also one of those people who insist no one should be allowed to write or even install software on their own devices without going through Apple, or who insist that private end-to-end encrypted messaging is going to end civilization by mostly empowering terrorists, child abusers, and "Drug Cartels" :/.
Saurik, it is HN, where people complain endlessly about Paypal, but never want to fix it because that would be 're-inventing banking'.
Nothing like losing all your money because you can't unlock your wallet any more. Or sent it to the tip.
I've also heard stories where people were locked out of exchanges during crashes, preventing liquidation, because exchanges stopped or delayed deposits during high volume trading.
Its super cool that you can keep your own crypto, but if you can't trade that crypto, whats the point?