Why sarcasm?

Centralized crypto "banking" institutions are the worst of both worlds. You are giving away your money to someone else, and there are no regulations to protect you from being screwed over by them.

With DeFi (decentralized finance) you have transparency over what the smart contract does.

(Of course you have to be careful because a lot of things claim to be decentralized but are actually centralized)

> With DeFi (decentralized finance) you have transparency over what the smart contract does.

No, you don't. People find subtle bugs in open source code all the time, some of them disastrous. Unintentional bugs in smart contracts have lost tens of millions of dollars multiple times; imagine what you could accomplish with intentional holes.

Parity lost $280M alone. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-froz...

Smart contracts for sure have their issues. But I would still choose a smart contract any time over these crypto companies which are completely opaque and unregulated, and basically "just trust me bro".

That's a false dichotomy; "neither" is an option.

Thats a major problem, but it's a different problem to the one OP is talking about - some shady guy taking or misusing your money on a whim

What if said shady guy wrote a subtle bug into the contract intentionally?

Has this ever happened or its just a hypothetical?

It seems that the remaining players will get larger leading to more centralization.

How come?

There are many people in crypto who aren't fond of companies like Coinbase or OpenSea.

The helped to make things a bit more mainstream, but they aren't paragons of decentralization.

Yeah, but de-fi had already been done successfully in the early 2000's well before Bitcoin and still didn't pan out in the end.

Done successfully and didn't pan out?!

Exactly!

The infrastructure worked. The concept did exactly what it was supposed to. 100% successful.

.. and yet lending to unreliable borrowers that no-one else wanted was still a stupid idea.

What are you referring to?

P2P lending.

Or “De-Fi” as the children call it.

Its hard to tell with this particular cult.