Yeah, but the conversion happens very quickly. Deposit, trade, withdraw.

Unfortunately, people leave tons of money on exchanges, for long periods of time. That's the problem. That's what the majority of exchange users are doing.

People leave money on exchanges because the alternatives are worse. They're almost as dangerous (if not more so): how many people have lost millions or billions due to malware, forgotten passwords, failed hard drives, death of the owner and inability to transfer that wealth to their heirs, etc.?

All of these problems are solvable with ludicrous levels of complication and confusion, and the average person doesn't even realize they need to take these sorts of measures until they've irrecoverably lost everything.

Do you think it's a good thing that we as a society are collectively extremely ignorant about how money works?

Don't you think that maybe people should start becoming more educated about how our economy runs? Or what protects their assets?

Don't you think someone with millions of dollars to lose should take some responsibility and become informed about how to protect them?

You could replace "money" with any specific area of human expertise. I don't need to fully understand how my body works because my doctor does. I don't need to fully understand how my car works because my mechanic does. I don't need to know how to build my home because my contractors know.

The information is available to those who are interested or want to further that area of human expertise, but the collective knowledge of humanity is too great for all of us to know everything. That's why we pay (mostly) regulated experts to handle these things for us.

(1) Knowing how to use crypto safely is hardly "expertise". It's something that can be learned quite quickly from experts.

(2) Having a general idea of many areas in life is important for a functioning society and becoming a healthy human being.

I really dislike this narrative that we must not think for ourselves. Always delegate. Always leave it to the experts. I see the same anti-intellectual sentiment in programming communities.

- Don't write assembly, compilers are smarter than you.

- Don't think about building your own networking stack. It's too complicated.

- Don't write your own OS. Do you think you can outperform Linux? Lol

> Don't you think someone with millions of dollars to lose should take some responsibility and become informed about how to protect them?

I really just think that if someone thinks an institution might disappear with their money they won't use the institution. If the alternative is too much of a hassle, or also seems like it could lead to loses then people will just not use crypto.

Without greater fools in sufficient quantity, cryptocurrency loses its speculative use-case. You won't get greater fools in sufficient quantity without centralized exchanges where people hold their funds.

Great, we don't need speculation in crypto. We need people taking a chance on the technology, and empower democratization of finance.

I believe BlockFi had all their assets on FTX

You can "buy cash" right now in amount from $100 to $1M on most d-web exchanges. Decentralized versions like Open Bazaar have worked for years just no one uses them so its more expensive and less choice.

Decentralized on/off ramps have existed for a LONG time and the fist was a key reason Bitcoin Core (BTC) broke away from the Bitcoin roadmap and became more of an "alt-coin" than the Bitcon we started with. Many think "SegWit" was a hack desigend to inject malicious code into Bitcoin Core to make these types of decentralized exchanges more difficult but then Vitalik just said fuck the US Government and came out with Ethereum.