Grocery stores aren’t necessary - you can grow your own food, dentists aren’t necessary - you can pull your own teeth, etc. It just seems like many people use exchanges and that’s what (at least partially) crypto is now.

Cryptocurrencies were meant as a "grow your own food" thing in the first place, they are supposed to be decentralized.

Hence it does not seem logical to go to a "grow your own food" subthread and wonder why it makes a point about store-bought food not being grown at home.

As with all things in life, a golden rule applies:

If you don't like it then don't use it, that's ok!

It seems more like a case of someone inventing tomatoes and getting mad that industrial farms starts planting them. That’s not tomatoes! It’s supposed to be decentralized!

Often the thing that’s envisioned by the creators is not the final say on market fit

I don't care that the industry uses someone's tomatoes :)

I merely care about the fact that the tomatoes are being called non-industrial even though they are 100% factory grown.

I.e. Binance is not "crypto".

Are you going to sit here and pretend that centralized marketplaces aren't how the vast majority of people deal with crypto?

No true scotsm... Never mind.

Worse than that. It's like people whose fortune is tied up in tomato plants insisting that none of the people eating tomatoes or exporting them or making sauces with them should be considered anything to do with the tomato industry

If there were no exchanges to provide a friction-free way for speculators and suckers to buy Bitcoins and Bitcoin recipients to turn them into spendable cash, there would be virtually no demand to buy or accept goods for Bitcoins, and the supply of Bitcoins exceeding the demand for them would obviously render them useless as a "store of value"

The golden rule doesn't apply here. Criminals are actively using cryptocurrencies to commit many crimes including tax fraud, money laundering, and ransomware. That harms everyone, at least indirectly, even if we don't use cryptocurrencies ourselves. So tight legal controls are appropriate here.

To draw an analogy, I support the individual right to keep and bear arms. But I don't want criminals to have access to weapons, and we can impose some reasonable rules to prevent that.

At this point "Cryptocurrencies" are only a small, even substantial part of the "Crypto Industry".

The moment general population became aware of "bitcoin" as "something you can buy that'll get more expensive", the whole technology and ideals behind it were overshadowed by speculative investors.

Sure, but then don't call it "crypto" industry if it is not about cryptocurrencies.

I don't care what you call it, calling the centralized Binance exchange "crypto" is just not accurate.

They don't deserve to co-opt the word.

Umm, you do realize that the purveyors of decentralized Ponzi schemes co-opted the word "crypto" from us serious minded folks concerned with cryptography?

Yes that sucks - which is why I had used the full word "cryptocurrency" in the non-quote parts of my replies :)

Just because it is centralized, and thus does not follow one of the purported principles of some cryptocurrency enthusiasts, does not mean that it is not both correct and useful to call it part of that industry.

Also: A lot of cryptocurrency enthusiasts (although not all) want and have wanted cryptocurrency to get broader adoption and acceptance. Exchanges are how that is going to happen. If it does happen.

Looking for hard drives in the trash does not scale.

No true ScotsCoin.

Oh god, is the next phase “true crypto has never been tried!”

But do they? It seems to me that most of the volume(and people) are on these centralized sites.

and github is not git

and linux is gnu/linux

.... now get off my lawn? dunno