oh, yeah i’ve used exchanges before. even in that bitcoin-powered “business” i described, it wasn’t closed: a bitcoin faucet drains BTC, while ads (at the time?) pay in $USD, so i had weekly USD -> BTC exchanges on a centralized exchange (i forget the name of the exchange).
sadly, i didn’t keep any of that Bitcoin. i was away from the space during the major bullruns — came back to it only in the last few years once i entered the workforce and wanted a place to store savings. i couldn’t make sense of the banking and investment systems (Fidelity, Vanguard): what happens if they lose customer balances due to datacenter fire/hacks/etc? what controls do they have in place to prevent that? at the time i just stashed my $ in BTC because it was the only place where i felt i understood the security model.
yeah, onramps help. several of the commercial transactions i’ve made with BTC have been through bitpay’s embeddable web widget. Stripe’s thing seems like the next evolution of that. it likely won’t alone cure the issue of creators who get kicked from payment platforms today (Stripe could kick them off just as well as Paypal/Patreon/et al), but it may pave the way toward future iterations that better solve that — just by getting more users familiar with cryptocurrency transaction flows. we’ll see :-) do you have any predictions?