Aight but the whole "be your own bank" thing depends on you maintaining your own full node. Otherwise you might as well be using PayPal. It doesn't do much good signing transactions if you don't also have a record of all the other transactions. I mean, centralized services could just as easily implement a "sign a message with a key" option for authorizing account actions. The whole point of bitcoin is keeping track of the public ledger so that nobody can get away with inflating the supply of money or double spending already spent outputs. These are the things that you cannot do, and by my estimation this makes you *not* a bitcoin user.
+1.
I have come in pretty late to this thread but your post is pretty much my view. Bitcoin is peddled as a decentralised payment system and all the latest decisions seem to be pushing it closer to centralised. The proliferation of web wallets and exchanges means that you don't need a client to *use* bitcoin - just a browser - but you are forced into trusting a 3rd party so you are pretty much back to centralised banks. The block chain is getting so large that most home users are running out of drive space on their netbooks, laptops and phones, and the verification time when you start the software is enormous unless you have a huge SSD. So again we are coming to rely on others to be guardians of the ledger, verify transactions, commit to the ledger and mine new bitcoins. That can all be done by one company!
I don't see this as a good trend. It was originally pitched there were no transaction fees. Well. Now there are and what they are is up to a very small group of people. The protocol should be thinning, IMO, not clumping into resource hungry clusters of services.