[otp209]

Centralization is just the natural order. No one actually wants to "be their own bank" or credit union. Who needs the headache?

It's like how libertarians are constantly surprised in the rare instances that they get what they supposedly want that it turns out they didn't want it at all, but rather their idealized version.

Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"". Which is why it does end up being centralized, just around the management of a handful of resource collectives.

[pixl97]

> libertarians are constantly surprised

I call this "Knocking down Chesterton's fence to be gored by a bull moments later"

[meiraleal]

At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.

> Cryptobros don't have any concrete idea of how putting stuff behind a cryptographic proof makes it ""decentralized"".

Let the cryptobros be wrong. Decentralized computing isn't about crypto, it is about reusing idle resource to create something bigger than big tech. BitTorrent is real, fediverse is real, IPFS...

[ben_w]

> At some point it becomes so easy that people start to wonder why they pay a middleman for no benefit.

"I am good at numbers, money is just numbers" https://xkcd.com/1570/

I have a lot of examples, including myself, of people reading a financial thing very badly wrong.

Sometimes it's a little thing, switching digits as you read £2.49 becoming £4.29.

Sometimes it's medium-sized mistakes like not understanding compound interest.

Sometimes it's big things like someone mistaking an example interest rate for a guarantee and getting a loan they can't afford to repay, or in the other direction assuming the high dividend rate on their share holdings will last forever and has no risk of becoming worthless.

Sometimes it's catastrophic things like a large cohort of people who ought to know better all reading the paper that just won the Nobel prize for economics, not realising that it doesn't work so well if all the risks are correlated with each other, and systematically mis-pricing the assets they sell to each other causing a major global crisis when too many bad debts get called in at the same time.

If my bank goes under, my government guarantees the return of my money — up to a certain threshold, but that guarantee is much more than the "lol" you get if your DIY "bank" lets out all the magic smoke.

[seanw444]

Not everyone that finds cryptocurrency useful and actually understands it is a "cryptobro". Decentralization and financial liberty is extra work. It will never be easier than the centralized solution. In fact, that goes for everything under the umbrella of liberty. You want more, prepare to do more work. Liberty and convenience almost never overlap, by their very nature.