Re: Buy the DIP, and HODL!

I believe that convenience and efficiency for Bitcoin must be built some centralization in mind, but the underlying should always be Bitcoin - decentralized and censorship-resistant.

That is for sure, to reach that peak of global use cases of bitcoin, there must be a centralized mindsets of the people to have an Concordia conceptions that everyone should be obligated to be self custodian to their funds and not just limited to that but the flexibility to accepting bitcoin for payments for the exercise and privilege of self custodian as JayJuanGee maybe prioritized.

In the very beginning of accumulating bitcoin, you might not need to be a self-custodian, yet each of us should try to keep some portion of our coins in self-custodian wallets.

The power of bitcoin comes from self-custody, yet no one is forced to self-custody, yet if everyone were to hold their keys with third parties (which means not hold their own coins), then bitcoin would lose its power.

A certain amount of self-custodianship has to continue to happen for bitcoin to retain its power.

On an individual level, you are also protecting yourself from various 3-rd party risks by holding your own keys.

In 2022, there were several exchanges that went bankrupt or otherwise did not have all the BTC they claimed to have, and several of them were gambling with the BTC that they held because they were promising high rates of yield for others to deposit their BTC, and so they maybe would pay 7% while they were receiving 15% or 20% from someone else and then so the exchange would keep the difference... but then it ended up that a bunch of these various parties were promising higher and higher levels of interest rates, and they only way that they could offer such higher rates was by using deposits from later investors to pay off early investors, and they were also gambling with the BTC to try to make returns that were greater than the rates that they were paying. Yet when the BTC market turned down in 2022, there was a lot of contagion since so many of the parties relied on the BTC price going up and the other products that they were gambling on in order to keep their payments going... so in the end, many of them did not have the coins they claimed to have to pay off all of their depositors.

So many people always chase convenience without noticing it comes at the cost of control and sovereignty, self custody might look like a hassle at first, but it is the very thing that makes Bitcoin different from the legacy system without it, we are just recreating the same centralized vulnerabilities we all are trying to run from it . And you are right there's are rooms for centralized tools or forum as long as the grassroot remains decentralized, the aim is not to kill the third parties but to make sure they don't become single point of failure again, its about balancing accessibility without compromised on core value and in the end a small self custody is better than none

You are right. Exempting the concept of decentralizations which gives the privilege to self custodian, the bitcoin and it blockchain is only dangling around with same concept of the traditional system. It digital form does not really make it a unique one because there had become an advanced digital banking system.
So what else can we rate advance to the banking system? The store of value? Of course not because there had still been existed commodities that posses same potential. In all, privacy is the unique form of bitcoin amongst every other currency or valuabilities.

You are right when you say that decentralization is the main distinction, but I respectfully disagree that Bitcoin merely dangles around, the same idea as conventional systems. Bitcoin's fundamental value lies not only in its digital form but also in its permissionless and trustless nature, which is something that even sophisticated digital banking is still unable to provide. You are still depending on outside parties when you use banks, and you run the risk of inflation, censorship, and access restrictions.
While commodities like gold have traditionally functioned as a store of value, Bitcoin offers features that most traditional assets do not for example portability, divisibility, and verifiability. Indeed, one advantage Bitcoin has over fiat and the majority of digital alternatives is privacy, when used properly. Therefore, although privacy is undoubtedly one of Bitcoin's advantages, the combination of its characteristics, scarcity, decentralization, borderless nature, and immutability creates a new financial standard, not just a digital clone of the old one....