But the fact is that almost everybody trusts an institution more than they trust themselves to physically hold their life savings.
Huh? /quoteThe Bitcoin of probably about 95% of retail investors is kept in their own name by some broker like Binance or CoinBase or the others.
Can you back these claims up? An investor who puts millions into FTX, Voyager or Celsius (as recent examples of collapsed crypto firms) isn't a serious one.
[/quote]
[/quote]
No, those investors didn't do their research into those companies and/or were swindled by criminals. But nobody serious puts giant portions of their large portfolio in the top drawer or their desk. They rely on an institution that has (or says they have) multiple layers of security and processes e.g. like a bank).
But most average investors--even big ones--don't have the infrastructure. They have to rent that from somebody else e.g. a financial institution.
Except that almost every "reputable" centralized exchange to this date has experienced cyberattacks that resulted in loss of funds. So, they don't just trust a financial institution; they trust an entity that is a matter of time until it is hacked or bankrupt. Given that information, I'd consider it obtuse to trust my money in such a firm.
Every single one? Really? If that's the case (and it isn't), then that would simply add to the cost of holding Bitcoin in the form of a risk premium.
At the end of the day, you either physically hold your own private key (for yourself or your firm), or you trust some firm to do that for you. Both have risks.
For the average consumer who doesn't have a billion dollar IT department at their disposal, they are more or less forced to trust somebody to do it for them. Nobody wants to hide their life savings under their mattress
There's no "problem" with keeping an account representing Bitcoin in your name, and I didn't say that large amounts "cannot / must not" be kept anonymously, but rather most people don't want to do that.
They don't want to do that, because they must report their earnings / investments / properties to the government. That's why I used "cannot" and "must not". If you buy a house and hide it from your government, you're in big trouble. Otherwise, I'm sure most people wouldn't want to report their properties anywhere.
[/quote]
Most people don't want to risk being prosecuted and imprisoned for tax evasion.
If you buy a house and don't report it to the government,
somebody can come steal your house and you will have no recourse.
While we all watch lots of TV shows where criminals live the crazy life they live with a gun at their side protecting their immediate physical assets, most people... don't want that. They don't own a gun and instead have assets in their name and institutions to do the protection for them.
Yes, they can pick the wrong one, but the fact is that most Americans don't worry, on a daily basis, that somebody in the county records office is going to switch the name on their house deed making them lose their house.
This is a very bad analogy. If some random stranger switches the name of your house to theirs, you can sue them and get it back. Same goes for banking. If a random stranger compromises Binance and steals your deposit, then it is outside's the police's and the law's power. Your last resort is the evidently inaccurate blockchain analysis. The coins are pretty much theirs now. The end.
[/quote]
Correct. That is all possible because
you put those assets in your own name and didn't purchase them anonymously. Most people want that kind of security. Hardly anybody would want to buy a house with an NFT that can be physically stolen or robbed at gunpoint (because there is no "you" when there's no identity).
This backs up into the fallacy that anarcho-libertarians often espouse, e.g. wouldn't it be great if there was "no government". Actually, it would be rather
terrible because everything you own would be a gunfight away from being taken from you. Institutions are helpful, as are governments. They obviously have a lot of problems themselves, but as a whole they are still better than the alternative.