Centralized Bittrex US closes and leaves the USA.

The news of this exchange leaving the USA, after it was suddenly sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, a division of the US Government, was met by many in the crypto world with sadness, as Bittrex was an exchange used by many Americans for many years.
However, Bitrtrex is a centralized exchange, which means when we use it, we withdrawal our cryptocurrency tokens from our wallets with cryptographic security and send it to Bittrex's wallet where we have no security and we have given up much of the protection and control over our money that cryptocurrency was supposed to provide.
While is often said we need centralized exchanges as the money rails to get fiat into and out of this ecosystem back into the world ecosyustem.
Do we really need centralized exchanges?
Should we have already developed a decentralized version of these exchanges to get money into and outof this ecosystem?
And will we every develop alternatives as long as we have centralized exchanges to depend upon?

Questions

We are going through a painful period, and many people are ou have a good afraid of the loss of centralized financial rails.
But perhaps instead of fear of the loss of centralized exchanges, perhaps we should embrace a future filled with decentralized alternatives.
I know the rules and regulations regarding money transfers and currency exchange make centralization the easiest path, but a more complex path shouldn't be out of the question. After all this is cryoptocurrency and complicated is practically in the name.
Few recognize that the SEC and other units of government are attacking the centralized financial rails, because they can, because they are centralized.
They will find it much more difficult to attack decentralized financial rails, and that is a good thing, because the more independent we are of things they can attack, the more independent we are of the government.
We can be law abiding citizens, using financial structures which the government can't attack.
The desire for privacy isn't criminal, it's a core value of western stlye democracy for over 500 years.
Why should we be asked to surrnder it now?

Dreamer

Some say that is a dream and that crypto will have to go through several evolutionary steps to get there.
But are we really that far off?
Do we already have hydrids?
Partially centralized alternatives like the existing money rail providers sitting inside decentralized wallets?
Yes, examples like Moon-Pay come to mind and their are others!
These are centralized money transfer agents on decentralized exchanges, which are a start.

We started out as a decentralized community with peer to peer exchanges.

Cryptocurrency started as a predominantly peer to peer exchange, and due to low volumes and dificulty matching buy orders with sell orders, a predominantly centralized exchange system developed due to immature peer to peer markets with low volumes, and the difficulty conducting transactions without a middle man or intermediary, but it wasn't impossible, it just required patience.
Truth be told the number of people using Bitcoin in the beginning was so small it makes efficient markets difficult. But had we some patience the peer to peer exchanges would have developed and think how much pain could have been avoided with Mt. Gox, Terra Luna and FTX to name a few.
The history of cryoptocurrency is filled with scams and theivery due to centralization without regulation in the middle of a decentralized cryptocurrency structure with no government oversight.

But now we have the ethereum virtual machine (EVM) and smart contracts.

Yes, we have ethereum EVM and smart contracts, Binance EVM and smart contracts, Polygon and smart contracts, and other decentralized systems are developing on Cosmos, Thorchain and others.
Perhaps if we weren't so inpatient and so keen to see financial facilities like what we were use to in traditional finance, those better ecentralized alternatives then simple peer to peer exchanges could have developed.
Unfortunately people use what is familiar, but these things which were familiar had none of the regulated protections we get from similar financial facilities in traditional finance.
So theft, greed and corruption run rampant in our ecosystem.
We are blessed with wonderful tools in cryptocurrency, but terrible complexity and ponderous number of steps to get from point A top point B.
Add to this a tremendously new vocabulary and a predominance of socially withdrawn individuals with less the stellar social skills and new people are ripped off, scolded, insulted.
Basically chased out of crypto town with their wallets emptied and their tails inbetween their legs daily.

Hope

But I take heart in the fact that everything, everywhere and all the time... things in cryptocurrency are changing.
Ideas are born every minute to make this financial niche better, safer and more reliable through transparency and creating more investor control over their assets.
We will progress, we will get better, our capitol just has to survive until then, and we just have to live long enough to see it come to pass.
Long live the optimistic, the studious, the patient and the testers with small amounts as they learn the rails and the rails improve.

title picture source

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta

The govt. can shut down all the on ramps and off ramps for crytpo and we will still be able to bypass them. Currently Hive has an on ramp called splinterlands. It is a bit complicated have to buy credits then turn them into cards which sell for dec, but it is an on ramp. There are several other on ramps across the cryptoverse similar to this.

Off ramps are even easier as you can buy various gift cards with crypto from various online sites. Amazon, streaming even visa prepaid cards can be bought for crypto. So off ramps are very easy.

Of course IMO it would be best to have SEC and company back off and figure out what they really are trying to do. Instead of attempting to nuke the whole crypto space like they are.