PayPal and your bank both transact in dollars. In the crypto space, presumably, you’d need to operate with different currencies at varying exchange rates. Or use some kind of “wrapped” currency at significant complexity and risk (see recent Ethereum-Solana bridge exploit and associated massive loss).
End users didn't suffer a loss after that exploit and I expect my risk from holding usdc and it crashing without Coinbase paying to fix things is already lower than the risk of my PayPal account being closed which I've seen happen to people.
I think no one really knows whether DeFi can be really safer than OldFi. Since it's old, we sort of know what to expect. In DeFi we obviously are still discovering.
I dislike OldFi and want to contribute to a new, healthier system to serve people in general. But, short term, risk of DeFi is obviously higher due to its imaturity.
OldFi has been maturing for 100's of years. Perhaps we could argue 1000's. It'll take at least 20-50 more years to reach a similar maturity in DeFi.
By maturity I mean: people understand the risks and know what to expect.
