I sincerely wish every centralized exchange had their own SBF to burn them down. The negative impact of "investors" has been terrible for crypto. They've turned what should have been a trustless medium into a caricature of traditional banking with all of its downsides and none of the benefits. Whats the point of computing all the hashes if you end up handing your coins to some guy who pinky promises to pay them back at some point in the future with interest?
Without centralized exchanges, do you think crypto would ever really have become a thing? I like to think it would, and that we don't need exchanges, because I too have a strong dislike for exchanges (if not a hatred), but I'm a fairly technical user and even for me it's not exactly easy to be deep into crypto without exchanges. Particularly when it comes to exchanging dollars for coins.
In (my preferable) alternative universe, there would have been no speculation and to buy crypto you would have to buy in smaller amounts in cash or at local shops. It would have displaced PayPal and been used primarily for e-commerce and local small dollar value transactions to allow small businesses to escape ACH fees. The largest movers would have been international travelers and migrant workers.
Good point, although can an exchange really exist that is decentralized? What would that look like? Basically just a neutral broker between two individuals? That is a very interesting idea
A decentralized exchange is called a DEX and there are a lot of them. The biggest one is UniSwap as far as I know. They operate via the blockchain's smart contract system. Unfortunately there's no way for them to handle exchanges with offline assets and currencies so I don't think they can exist in a world without CEX.
Yes anyone with bitcoin can "exchange" bitcoin directly, but when most people say "exchange" they mean some sort of trusted third party that executes and coordinates trades on somebody's behalf. With most crypto currencies there are significant risk and trust issues when going directly unless you trust the other party. It can also be very difficult to find somebody who wants to buy or sell the amount of coin that you are looking to buy/sell, so there's considerable utility in the match making.
Actually, I wish we could burn down the IRS instead. I have to pay $1 of taxes to the US government for every $1 of Bitcoin I want to spend, because when I pull it out of my Bitcoin wallet (hardware, software, exchange, it doesn't matter) they consider it a "taxable event" and I have to pay taxes according to it's USD value, which ultimately makes its ecosystem still tied to USD, and makes me reluctant to spend crypto because of the taxation. Total bullshit. I'm just spending a currency.
Singapore doesn't tax this, you can spend crypto and transact crypto and none of that is taxable.
> I have to pay $1 of taxes to the US government for every $1 of Bitcoin I want to spend
AIUI, if the basis price of your Bitcoin was $0 and your marginal income tax rate was 50% and it was a short-term gain, that would be correct, but:
(1) Your basis value shouldn't usually be 0 or close to it,
(2) Where (1) does not hold, because you got Bitcoin when the price was near 0, it should usually be a long-term gain, on which you pay the lower LTCG rate, and
(3) The top marginal income tax rate that you would have to pay to the US government is well below 50% to start with.
> Singapore doesn't tax this, you can spend crypto and transact crypto and none of that is taxable.
Singapore is, then, tax subsidizing crypto speculation, which seems like a phenomenally bad policy (but orobably sustainable, as long as the crowd that can afford to engage in it locally is small enough that the effective subsidy can be absorbed), but, I mean, you should absolutely feel free to emigrate to Singapore if they’ll let you if this is important to you.
