«
Not your Keys, Not your Coins ». « Dont keep your Bitcoin on exchanges »
These advices are excellent, and no rational person with a genuine interest for Bitcoin should ignore them. There's no need to explain why, when you consider the number of
scandals,
scams, exit scams and accounts frozen seized by the different CEX; because, let's not forget, CEXs work hand in hand with governments.
All the people advising this are therefore informed that CEXs are not reliable, do not work in our personal interest, and rightly so.
However, every time I read this on the internet, people stop at the Bitcoin
storage step. That's not enough. There's another
important step:
exchanging Bitcoin.
So why not just advise and tell people to stop using CEX
entirely? Bitcoin is by nature
decentralized, why make it centralized? Why should a CEX that doesn't deserve to store our financial funds, our cryptos, deserve to be left with our banking and personal information?
Is it really that important to take the risk of having your funds frozen, losing your personal data, and enriching these useless people? Who wants to contribute to CZ's
wealth, or encourage Coinbase in their
disgusting practices?
Some will reply that CEX users choose "convenience ". Even that's not true! How is passing your KYC to Binance and using their UI easier than installing/using the Peachbitcoin (for example) app? Its
not! The only reason CEXs are in this position is because they benefit from substantial advertising resources.
We have effecient, fast, simple, user-friendly and totally P2P solutions at our disposal. For example :
-
Bisq, a great P2P exchange, focused on privacy
-
PeachBitcoin, their motto is #KYCfree
-
Robosats, simple and efficient for those using Lightning network
-
Majestic Bank, where you can swap BTC and XMR in a privacy-friendly way
-
LocalMonero, another P2P exchange platform ; privacy focused
There are
plenty of others, which you can easily find on
kycnot.meSo why not advise people to use these services,
in addition to advising them to use a non-custodial wallet?
Why shouldn't we be as enthusiastic about advising people not to use and register on CEX as we are about not storing their BTC there?
Not your keys, not your coins. No CEX at all.
P.S. : In this topic I'm not interested in altcoins and launchpad launchpool type products, I'm only talking about Bitcoin exchange and storage. Personally, I don't think any launchpad justify a KYC procedure, but it's up to each individual to determine his or her priorities.
For those who want to read more on this subject, I highly recommend this
topic from
GazetaBitcoin While I agree with you, and truth be told I support with all my heart and soul the novel advocacy that bitcoin drives thanks to its decentralized nature, there's a method to the madness that these people who support and use CEXs are under.
For some, it's the convenience that it brings, "don't worry about the KYC process as they say, it's the one that's got 5 stars in the App Store, it got good reviews on Google Play, and a lot of people around me are using it, so why shouldn't I?" is some of their argument, which is a strong one at that too cause for me, there's little that could compete with convenience and efficiency, two things that CEX are able to do so with finesse. The paradigm is slowly changing however, as more and more people see how flawed the CEX world is, so in the future, it's pretty possible that more people use decentralized no KYC platforms in stead of the ones that we use right now.
