Re: Looking back at the White paper... Do you think Satoshi would be proud of us?
Hardly anyone are making Bitcoin payments without going through some kind of centralized third party, like payment processors and exchanges or wallet providers.
Yes, you are right. People have to reveal their identity especially when they intend to cash out their profit or buy bitcoin with fiat. But that's not the problem of bitcoin. That's the problem of fiat money and strict rules made by governments.
I think Satoshi is satisfied now. Many people are using bitcoin and the number of people is increasing. Till now, everything has gone well.
Unfortunately that is not entirely true. Satoshi wanted us to run Bitcoin Core and some full nodes to sustain the network and then to use that as our wallet, not a centralized wallet provider or an exchange.
You can have a Billion people using Coinbase and with one switch of a button, that Billion people will be without any bitcoins. You need to own the Private key to own the coins.
fixd that for you. as core was not around in satoshis day. satoshi wanted diversity. he didnt want to be leader and be the central point he didnt want followers just asking him.
also having just core is also as bad as having exchanges. coz just one bad line of code and bam ..full network bug
diverse fullnodes of different languages and teams all part of a level playing field is what should secure the network.
anyway apart from that little edit the rest of your comment is correct