Naive people who do not understand bitcoin, use services that take away ownership of coins, like coinbase, circle, etc. because they achieve a few advantages over traditional bank accounts - its fast, no downtime & without limits. Banks are moving towards digitalization all over the world and these advantages will no longer remain so in future if banks decide on getting their game sorted. Then people who see value in using services like coinbase will go away because banks can provide all advantages of coinbase even today if they decide to, but much better.
However, what they can't provide is decentralization & privacy. But people who use coinbase, by virtue of them using it, do not desire decentralization & privacy. Thus, the bitcoin community should not pay attention to these companies or their users (though they might be large in numbers & even be current majority of users) unless decentralization & privacy is no longer desirable in bitcoin.
Coinbase still doesn't solve that without compromising decentralization & privacy, no one does. The premise of centralization is achieving security by compromising liberty. When buying bitcoin you are achieving liberty but compromising on peace of mind by being responsible for your own security.
Ignoring the companies that onboard almost all new users and process transactions for most merchants sounds like a bad idea. But whatever, it's clear at this point that Ethereum will be how most people interact with blockchains for the first time. Anyone who wants to ignore the drama should pick up the docs and start building cool stuff with us.
Blockchains are a liberating technology, and I want liberty for the people. I want the network effect of decentralized identities to suck in as many applications as possible and liberate their users. My goal is mass adoption.
Money is inherently political. The ease of creating viable competing currencies will constrain the politics, but it can never eliminate it.
And yet all the difficulties cited in the linked article are political difficulties. Anytime you put three or more people in a room together, you get politics.
I think it has pretty good solutions for those, but that's not the point. Blockchains are viewed as a way to make money from speculation, which is why the Bitcoin community is freaking out. Blockchains are actually a revolutionary technology for empowering users with applications they control. If Ethereum had the same sort of governance issue, it wouldn't matter. All of us developers would move our apps to whichever chain ends up being stable, because they'll all support the EVM our apps run on.
Yes, but since no chain is 'stable' or has solutions for these issues, a developer should spend time building apps on their own blockchains which takes just minutes to make.
