It’s not an indictment of the protocol, so much as it is saying that the protocol is too low-level for average users and therefore centralized players (like Coinbase) tend to step in and provide the desired service.
I'm not sure, is the x86 instruction set too low level? Yes if you expect users to interact with it directly, but not for user facing products to be built on top of.
You can point to centralized products built on top of blockchain, but also decentralized ones.
An important difference being that nobody ever expected users to use the x86 instruction set directly. Whereas the very clear initial expectation for Bitcoin was that it was an actual currency used for transactions by end users.
On what part of the stack exactly? Are they crafting RPC requests to a BTC node manually? Using wallet software? Using more advanced wallet software with social recovery features and named addresses?
I think you may be forgetting, earlier users of computers were using punchcards..
Are you... asking me to explain what the Bitcoin folks were thinking when they claimed they were creating a viable peer-to-peer electronic cash system? Sorry, you'll have to ask them that. About 80% of what cryptocurrency advocates claim to believe seems unrealistic to me. But given that they published that paper in 2008, I suspect punch cards were not what they had in mind.
Yes. A few years ago decentralized exchanges did not exist, now one of the largest exchanges is fully decentralized..Obviously simple payments could always be made in a decentralized way but creating actual applications wasn't possible until recently.
