Nobody forces you to use Binance or FTX. I have been using Bitcoin for 10 years and I've always stored more 90% of my BTC in my own self-custody wallet, only used exchanges briefly.

What have you been "using" Bitcoin for, may I ask?

- Long term "Savings account" - a volatile one, of course - I buy stuff from online with it, household items (In country I live you can basically buy anything with BTC) - Travel, I book hotels/flight with it and once I rented a boat for a family trip

In addition to that I now and then try to pay with Bitcoins at other stores. Last time got excited about boltcards (https://github.com/boltcard/boltcard) there are few places in my country which accept it, but it is quite a new thing.

What country is that, if you don't mind sharing? It's the first time I hear this

I suspect one whose own banking system is on par with BTC risk-wise. (Apologies to gp if that was clueless, it just comes to mind first.)

You may not ;)

Buying MDMA safely. This isn't a joke. Drug prohibition causes harm, crypto provides a much safer way to obtain psychedelics. If all your purchases are safe for the state to be aware of, good for you.

It seems insane to me people would buy/sell drugs in a prohibition nation on a public ledger.

For whatever it's worth, the federal authorities have very little budget/mandate to prosecute darknet drug distribution offenses. They go after the darknet markets themselves, money laundering / sanctions avoidance and maybe firearms.

Meanwhile the local authorities don't know what most of those words mean.

Monero

Centralization is more efficient than consensus building.

This is true. Don't know why people are down voting you. But it calls into question why we need centralized exchanges of decentralized assets. The answer, of course, is financial speculation and sophisticated shell games that make some folks billionaires at the cost of the marks who get suckered into believing they're getting in the ground floor of the next big thing.

Only if the central entity can be trusted not to become a corrupt rent seeker.

(Looks meaningfully at TicketMaster)

I agree with this as well. Efficiency is orthogonal to desirable outcomes.

My point is that things tend towards centralization because the market rewards efficiency.

in which part of this discussion has anyone talked about something decentralized? This is about two centralized exchanges that hold custody of users cryptoassets

Future is decentralized. Even CZ knows this :)

Dexes like uniswap have been doing just fine

So few people understand this. But, don't worry. Great inventions need some time to be realized.

Can you name off the top of your head 5 great inventions that weren't immediately realized?

Notably, the internet was widely thought to be a fad for the first ~20 years.

Notably, according to crypto evangelists. No one thought the internet was a fad. It had a time when it was novel and therefore people who didn't know how to use it would make fun of it, but absolutely no one who used it thought it was a 'fad'. As soon as the first web browser became accessible to consumers the dot com era exploded. There is a difference between 'didn't hit mass adoption due to massive infrastructure needing to be built in real time' and 'we don't know what this is useful for'.

> No one thought the internet was a fad.

Wrong.

[0] 1995 Wired Magazine "Most things that succeed don’t require retraining 250 million people."

[1] 1995 NewsWeek "The Internet is a fad" https://www.peterlundell.com/the-internet-is-a-fad/

[2] 2000 Daily Mail "Internet may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it." https://regia-marinho.medium.com/internet-may-be-just-a-pass...

etc. etc.

Anyone who was a nerd in the 80s and early 90s knows that we spent the better part of two decades being told that the internet was no more revolutionary than fax machines and that most people would never use it.

Some op-ed pieces and getting mocked by people for being a nerd do not demonstrate to me a fundamental disagreement about the usefulness of the internet amongst people who understood what it was. Ignorance is annoying, but it is easily remedied by exposure and knowledge.

Contrast this with a cryptocurrency technologies, which are completely understood at this point and still lack legit real-world use at scale beyond speculation and yet it is constantly claimed that 'it just takes time for brilliant technology to find a use case'.

As far as I can recall, this has never been the case in the modern world -- every paradigm changing technology has had an immediate and obvious application where it greatly surpassed anything before it, regardless of if it took years or decades to build infrastructure and educate people on how to use it.

I suppose it depends on how you're defining the first year of the internet, but I don't remember many people thinking it was a fad. I'd say it's the one invention in my life that has actually lived up to the hype.

I’m not saying whatever that is is a great invention but

Alternating current… Computers… Smartphones… The internet…

I think you are mistaking 'waiting for technology/infrastructure to mature enough to make them accessible to everyone' with 'technology that people don't know how to do something useful with'.

Does anyone both use these and correctly report their taxes? The accounting seems like a pain.

Cointracker and Koinly both support tax reporting on swaps and liquidity providing on uniswap and many other dexes.

Oh absolutely. I would never not let the government take a slice of my hard earned money.

You mean “let the government prevent inflation”.

(If everyone pays income taxes, noone’s relative purchasing power is reduced by paying them, because you have the same % of the money supply. More or less.)

Except they are unusuable most of the time due the hogh transaction fees.

This is true for Eth, but there are many chains where DeFi exchange transaction fees are a rounding error