> Explain.
I wouldn't read into that comment (of mine) too much. I meant what I said in an abstract sense.
> False equivalence, MTGOX wasn't a Publically traded company with tons of VC money and lots of institutional funds (Ark et al) backing them; Mark embezzled funds and had horrible OPSEC that led to a massive hack. He tried covering this up, Coinbase reporting a massive loss is definitely not the same thing.
Fair enough; good point. They are different. But I do think these intermediary, exchange entities, whatever you want to call them, tend to emerge repeatedly, with their own vulnerabilities, in a way that isn't always fully recognized in a lot of the discussion of cryptocurrency. My sense (which could certainly be wrong) is there's a bit of a gap between blockchain-level issues and macroeconomic theory as it comes up in discussions of cryptocurrency.
> And what exactly is Crypto theory, exactly?
I just meant academic computer science - economic theory about cryptocurrency, like you might have in conference proceedings, academic journal articles, or technical papers openly distributed for critique and discussion. Maybe the sort of thing that might get discussed in formal policy reports by various public and private profit and nonprofit institutions.
> The Infrastructure was meant to be P2P, as noted in the White paper by Satoshi: exchanges are merely a response from the growing Market to cater to the increase in demand,
I think that's part of what I'm getting at. From the very beginning it's been clear to me people generally don't actually want pure cryptocurrency P2P in the sense they don't actually want to store the entire blockchain on their laptop. So these kinds of intermediary structures will emerge.
> and the truth is they still exist. Kraken, Binance, Gemini etc... still exist and will for some time. The number of exchanges isn't the issue in 'Cryoto land,' it's the scams
I don't mean to imply I have a problem with exchanges per se, it's that it would be nice if there was some kind of robustness built in surrounding them. Maybe fraud is inherent to all economic systems (people lose money all the time on traditional stock exchanges and in investment schemes), but it would be nice if there was something like, just say hypothetically, a higher-order layer akin to the FDIC etc (in the absence of the FDIC etc), but distributed or something? I just think these things aren't really well-worked out -- the idea that someone could exchange USD into crypto and then have it disappear because a central entity collapses is going against the grain of what crypto is supposed to prevent.