You're talking to a server to buy/sell BTC instead of a true p2p. You're not truly anonymous as Coinbase has to listen to warrants and would give up your identifying info attached to your Public key. This isn't part of the original crypto currency philosophy. It's just stock trading with extra steps #tech
Yep, earlier it used to be banks that were the middlemen. Now, it is these big exchanges, that came to remove those middlemen but instead ended up taking their position
Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins
The more you learn about what the crypto folks claim and what these companies are doing the more dumb all of this sounds
As in my post sounds dumb?
BTC is utter dogshit for direct p2p transactions, it only supports ~3000 transactions per 10min block generation. Without middlemen it would be useless for most use cases of the general population.
That’s the limitations of Proof of work ,lightning network is taking care of small micro transactions in faster way.
How does Lightning defend against Sybil attacks if there’s no PoW or (I assume) PoS?
I think there will always be a place for centralized exchanges in a decentralized ecosystem. They allow for an "on ramp" from fiat to crypto for those who need it. They can reduce fees for transactions that are small relative to gas fees. There are L2 solutions or other Blockchain scaling projects that can also help with this. It also creates a space between blockchains, when a bridge doesn't exist. For example, trading DOGE for BTC isn't supported by the chains themselves, so they rely on third parties to facilitate those trades. There are projects in the crypto space solving cross chain functionality, but it's a work in progress. Centralized entities provide value to a decentralized ecosystem by supporting behavior that is unsupported, difficult, or expensive to accomplish within that ecosystem. If everyone in the world just bought crypto on Coinbase and only exchanged it exclusively on Coinbase, then yeah, I think that would undermine crypto philosophy. However, I think it speaks to the power of crypto that you can use it entirely decentralized when needed, and you can integrate with centralized services to bridge the gaps when you need to.
Hi @Coinbase, Can I DM you for a referral?
Calling Coinbase a “BTC company” shows your ignorance to be blunt. It’s an exchange, albeit a publicly traded one. It brings high levels of crypto adoption from the general population.
Ok I'm ignorant in calling them that. But they are still middleman making cryptocurrency not truly peer to peer
You use Coinbase typically to buy crypto at which point you can transfer it, for example Bitcoin, to your hard wallet like a ledger. There is nothing inherently wrong with that from a peer-to-peer perspective.