I do wish more people saw it that way.  Imagine you are satoshi.  You've just designed a revolutionary new peer-to-peer protocol, where Person A can send funds to Person B without any intermediaries blocking the transaction, freezing funds, harvesting user data, etc.  And then the first thing people do with it is introduce middlemen who do all of those terrible things and more.  Wouldn't you be disappointed/annoyed/saddened by that?

I get that convenience is important to some people (or seemingly most people).  But isn't it missing the point somewhat when the whole idea was to remove the need for trusting intermediaries?  I guess there are always going to be too many daytraders to make my idealism anything other than pure naivité.

Nowadays I avoid centralised exchanges wherever possible.  It helps that all the ones that used to be tolerable are either gone or introduced KYC.  Plus I'm not much of a gambler, which I suspect is a considerable part of the appeal for some (I sometimes wonder how many people who call themselves 'traders' are merely people with a gambling addiction).  The cons of CEX massively outweigh the pros, so there's little incentive for me to be sucked in to all of it.

In theory it might be better to use P2P to exchange Bitcoins, but for trading of course it is not good and even very impractical to use a P2P system. Indeed, at first Bitcoin was traded with a P2P system, but with the increasingly massive adoption of Bitcoin it is certainly impractical to use a system like this. The presence of the CEX platform is the answer to make it easier for users and traders who want to exchange or trade their Bitcoins more quickly and easily.
Maybe for those of you who use USD and only want to invest in Bitcoin, the P2P method might be more secure, but for some people who use local currency and want to trade quickly, using CEX is much more practical. So I personally think it's up to the user whether to use P2P or CEX, because each has its advantages and disadvantages, neither is much better nor worse.

I've said it a few times, if Satoshi is dead he for sure had died a few more times from rolling in his grave.

That aside, there is a tiny difference here, Satoshi would be probably mad if you would use an intermediary to pay with Bitcoins, such a coinbase or Binance account, but if we talk strictly about buying and selling bitcoins for $ there is little alternative to a third party. Oh, you don't use Binance you sue Bisq, but you still get your fiat in a bank account, via WU, via Swish or any other payment method.
So if you're not going to use cash, you're still definitely going to use a 3rd party that for sure going to do all the above things you mentioned.

But again, despite what OP is claiming, people do this because! it's convenient and unless you find a way to do that p2p just as easily as pressing buy in an app where Gpay is autocompleting your cc details nothing is going to change, hundreds of innovations and companies have failed exactly because of this, we're in an age where everyone wants a tap and that's it, two taps maximum, once you ask them for a few extra steps it's bye bye.


Bitcoin has always been decentralized and will never be centralized.
If people want to use it like that they are free to do so, and not just you as I'm right now replying to more on this topic, you should not forget there are two things that are true at the same time:
"Not your keys, not your coins" but also "My coins, my decision"

Of course, it's not the outcome we would want, it's not making much sense but at the same time, but nothing is broken and the whole environment works just as planned, where everyone is making his moves as he wishes.

doomads post history for years is his preference that people use middlemen(channel+routing partner) for payments. heck he even celebrates services that middleman the $->altnet token IOU's but he hates people using the same service to $->legacy bitcoin.
if he can persuade people to use their fiat via a middleman to buy his altnet IOU inbound balance of an altnet he is all for it. even at a cost of making bitcoin have more barriers of entry to just hoard bitcoin as bitcoin on the bitcoin network

he wants to ruin bitcoins exchange rate and ability so that people adopt his prefered altnet iou token which people are locked into a partnership with for months

i agree with other people CEX place is for exchanging(and withdrawing same day) and should not be used for custodianising/banking. but the way the games are being played by some. they are making barriers of entry for those that want to own the private keys and self hoard, by getting people to lock value up in other systems and networks pretending it offers more 'decentralisation' when reality if far different

bitcoin peers just relay, they dont mess around co-signing payments nor take commissions/fee's per peer.. unlike LN

but i see how now you want to make an altnet pretend to be more bitcoiny than bitcoin.. nice try but your mentor has been selling you the bad information.. ask him for a refund
i do laugh when i see the same few people come to each others PR campaign defense

if you cant just take a private key from the wallet holding the coins to another wallet and just spend openly however you want. its not a true "your key, your coin" situation..
LN locks value up in a key and messes with silly units of measure(msat) that bitcoin does not recognise.
and no you cant just take a privkey out of LN and spend the funds openly elsewhere using any other true bitcoin wallet. your locked into a co-signed agreement with someone else. aka co-custodian

also
LN uses channel routing where middle men decide to use their value as a pass-the-parcel game of borrowing their balances to pas a payment, where they can refuse too. and they also charge a fee for agreeing..
and thats a fee per middleman not per payment.
 totally not the same as bitcoins peer relay system

LEARN SOMETHING

as for the second IOU status
many many LN wallets open channels and give inbound balance without a confirmed bitcoin transaction peg..
so yea..
and that onion payment promising to owe something to someone when they later settle.. those onion payment iou agreements are not even in a bitcoin tx format..

stop pretending LN is more like bitcoin than actual bitcoin. becasue LN is nothing like it on make levels

LEARN SOMETHING

even the LN devs know of its flaws hence why their solution is now to open custodian "factory" "federation" "hubs" "watchtowers" to manage users balance

and i do laugh when you say "just broadcast"
time you learn un-cooperative broadcasts

and one last lesson. this one will be the tough one
becasue bitcoin peers do not take a commission not have signing management of payments they are not classed as payment facilitators
however LN routers by have payment signing ability and take a fee. so yes routers are payment facilitators and you will soon learn by reading many countries regulations that they are going to come after LN routers and treating them as such, meaning they will require PF/MSB licences.
goodluck with your education. dont waste another 3 years on your mentors lies and empty promises and fantasies

"We" are not being hacked by centralized exchanges. They are hacked, lost their treasuries and as their users, we lose our money when they reject to compensate users or no longer have enough money for compensation. Exchanges can scam us too and run away with our money, not hack us.

Not we, not all of us store our coins on exchanges. If it is you, it is your choice.

Do you really trade day by day, very often?

Only store a little capital of all you have on exchanges to trade. If you store all capital on exchange account, hopefully you won't pay high cost if one exchange goes away like FTX within a week.

Even they are not 100% decentralized, you can use them more safely for your capital than with centralized exchanges. You must use one wallet for trading on DEX and never use your main wallet for DEX trading.

Although this approach is indeed profitable (earning some btc while binance keep your coins), it is at the same time dangerous for innumerous reasons.

• Exchange hacks...
• regulation problems may ban binance from your country and you might be unable to reach your coins.
• KYC compliance may force them to ask for documentation with proofs where did that btc come from. And they may just reject your sig campaign/mixed coins, keeping your funds hostage
• financial problems with binance (which can happen, even gigant banks can collapse)
• and list goes on

Ah, brother it was my way to show out stupidity. We are hacked by centralized exchanges means we have built up beliefs that's making us to deposit our money on those exchanges. It means that our brains are totally hacked by those exchanges and we can't avoid using those exchanges. I assure you that most people who are crypto-traders are using those exchanges and they are also storing their money on those exchanges. I know that hackers can hack money out of those exchanges, and that thing can happen more easily with decentralized exchanges. The security measures of the centralized exchanges are way advanced than the decentralized ones.

I will still favor my beliefs that decentralized exchanges are more risky, and once example of such exchange was BetterCallRaul, they just rug-pulled users money, and created fake screenshots to prove that they were seized by authorities. That event happened on this forum because they were running their campaign on the forum, and after they were done with their rug-pull scheme they didn't even paid the remaining money of the participants of the signature campaign. That's why I think that it's more risky to trust decentralized exchanges because they can shutdown their operations anytime.

I would also clarify that I'm not in favor of centralized exchanges, but right now they are still more trustworthy than decentralized exchanges for conversion of Bitcoin into fiat or any other stable-coin for trading purpose. I wont say that all decentralized platforms are like those, but it would be unfair to say that those all decentralized exchanges can be trusted.

There is one problem with this quote. This quote assumes that everybody that uses bitcoin understands its underlying tech. In fact, some people don't care about it at all. Some people just use crypto as a way to get rich quick. For them, it doesn't matter what they are trading. BTC, ETH, LTC, XMR, DOGE, SHIB... These are all the same for these people. For them BTC is just another casino token. We can't expect them to think that much even though it is in their interest to think about these stuff. Some people will fail anyway.

You said "Not your keys, Not your coins" is not enough... and I say, "Not your keys, Not your coins" is more than enough. (for these people anyway)