Why do so many of the comments here and journalists assert that crypto and exchanges are the same thing? Doesn't keeping coin in an exchange (as opposed to in a wallet, locally) sort of violate the ideology of crypto? Wasn't this shit invented to circumvent the banks? I don't get it, using something meant to circumvent the banks, just to invest it in a less regulated form of a bank Isn't to say I have a problem with…
It's because bitcoin's p2p user interface is awful or nonexistant.
In a world where people were using nothing but some sort of a peer-to-peer currency this system would be unbelievably amazing. The reason exchanges exist is because fiat currencies still exist, and so there's a lot of demand for exchanging between peer-to-peer currencies and fiat currencies.