By The Time CEXs are Dead...

Litecoin is having quite some pump lately. It had an even stronger one before the FTX crash and seeing it rise in price I just remembered that it was my first crypto ever. It was probably October or November 2017, when I bought LTC. I had something like 10 of them which I actually sold two weeks later for a $50 profit.

I was afraid not to lose all my money :).

I wasn't using Binance or any other renowned crypto exchange back then. My gateway to crypto was some Romanian exchange that got closed soon after I used it. Although being a noob, I actually did use that shitty exchange the way such a service has to be used, the same as public toilets.

You enter, make the deposit and leave. That's what I did, bought the 10 LTC, stored it on a noncustodial wallet(Jaxx), and nothing more. Then sold the LTC, cased out "the profits" and left. After a while, I found out about Poloniex, Binance, etc... And a whole new era of being a crypto head began for me.

Getting into crypto involves some sort of exchange, it's basically impossible to grab yourself some Bitcoin without having an account on a CEX or something like that. You can buy it directly from some persons you know that are willing to sell and that makes it a sort of an OTC trade, or you can use a wallet that supports crypto purchases such as Exodus, but somehow you need some sort of service to facilitate your purchase.

Unless you are able to earn it, and then you don't need any damn CEX for such operations. CEXs have a long history already and the industry has evolved a lot in the past few years. Some got hacked, others got into DeFi too, and a bunch of them like FTX got nuked either by their wrongfully applied business model or by the leading entities.

Mt. Gox is probably the most famous CEX that has gone down in the history of crypto. If I remember correctly we're talking about something like 650,000 BTC that have supposedly been hacked from that exchange. Many of the investors who chose to hold their Bitcoin on that exchange haven't yet been refunded.

Crypto exchanges have evolved a lot, I already mentioned that, you can now do much more with a CEX account other than just trade or buy/sell crypto, but CEXs have also gone beast mode on KYC in their quest for regulatory acceptance from the authorities under the jurisdiction they activate.

KYC doesn't mean shit... FTX has probably had its KYC system well maintained, but that didn't stop it from falling like a house of cards and making tons of users suffer in the process. I guess we should have something like a proof of reserves instead of KYC, Binance came up with this proposal about a week ago. That would offer much more protection to customers than the current KYC/AML measures. These are not even actually about security in any way, but rather about control.

El Salvador put Bitcoin on the "crypto legal tender map". It's a bit over one year since they adopted BTC as legal tender and they're now working on a Digital Asset Issuance Law, which would facilitate operations with any crypto asset. I know, lightning network can do a tremendous job, but why not give the people options.

We will probably be able to pay for goods in El Salvador with USDT, DOGE, and even HBD which IMO is the true mass adoption we are "unconsciously seeking" for.

DEXs are the panacea for CEXs and although I'm not an avid user of DeFi I can clearly see the value in it, but at the end of the day, we have to have ways of dealing with crypto and gateways between the current money system and crypto that are outside the reach of CEXs. Being able to earn crypto online(Hiving, trading, investing etc) and spend it at a local shop or whatever, is the ultimate form of mass adoption to me.

CEXs won't die any time soon, but if we really want to make crypto an integral part of our life we have to find different ways to bridge crypto and fiat other than the current centralized entities, until we no longer need fiat...

Thanks for your attention, Adrian

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