But, has it really failed if these people choose to forfeit custody? I mean, if you personally don't care about self-custody, does that alter Bitcoin's goal or my interaction with Bitcoin? Bitcoin is all about freedom of choice in the end. It allows you to mistreat it.
Well, there's no technical reason to invest in Bitcoin if you aren't interested in decentralization.
But the investors who don't care about decentralization are probably responsible for 95% of Bitcoin's market cap.
In other words, if there were no central brokerages and all investors of Bitcoin were forced to mess around with private keys, keeping those keys on their physical person, then only a tiny few would invest, and almost nobody would want to invest anything significant lest their life savings
end up in a landfill. Unless we're talking about the cash in your wallet, most people want to keep their holdings
in their name.
So yes, the fact that most people don't use Bitcoin in the way Bitcoin was intended surely affects
everybody's use of Bitcoin since
those people make it a wildly appreciating asset and not just a curiosity for a few tech folks like us.
And seriously, in real life, do people
here actually use Bitcoin for their daily transactions? Do they put their entire life savings into Bitcoin? (God I hope not lest it lose 75% of its value again like it did only 18 months ago).