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Comment by dotnet00 | Hacker News Reader

Centralized ~exchanges~ (edit: services) defeat the point of crypto (particularly of a blockchain), so people responsible for said centralization are only in it for the money. Thus, the question with all of these companies is how long before they get outed for scamming their customers.

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That's a reductionist view, there can be many reasons why somebody would want to temporarily park a portion of their assets on a centralized exchange. It's a a trade off between convenience, security, higher liquidity, trading opportunities et cetera, these are just some that come to mind. One can do all of that and still have the majority of their assets in cold storage. The world is not white and black.

From the Bitcoin whitepaper: "A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority ... The problem with this solution is that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company"

The vision of course did not include centralized authorities, it's counter to the entire purpose. We already have had digital banks, crypto is not about having digital convenience. It's not the "exchange" part that wasn't envisioned, it's the "centralized" part, because that is the same thing as a bank. That's what the SEC (rightly) made their case on with Coinbase and others. Bitconnect, FTX, Coinbase... that kind of thing was not envisioned originally and is counter to the whole concept and purpose of crypto.

"One can do all of that and still have the majority of their assets in cold storage."

Nice try with the quotes hahah. But no, that is not mentioned in the whitepaper, and you are way off now: Cold storage is a cloud term for long-term storage, it has nothing to do with "cold wallets" - the term centralized exchanges use for "off-chain" assets.

Also this (from bitcoin whitepaper):

"A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of 1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in memory."

I'm convinced 90% of people talking about crypto don't get it.

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