Almost every company in the Bitcoin space at the moment is doing something that's diametrically opposed to the core innovations behind Bitcoin. A good follow-up

Almost every company in the Bitcoin space at the moment is doing something that's diametrically opposed to the core innovations behind Bitcoin. A good follow-up to your payment card example: its long since been possible to do peer-to-peer, decentralized cryptocurrency exchange without a third-party with more than one kind of smart contract to allow this, yet because centralized exchanges are easier to build and more profitable to run – they have become the norm -- and the exchange just ends up "iterating" on security ;) The Bitcoin eco-system is full of double-speak and immense cognitive dissonance. It's a weird community where people purport to be about decentralization, freedom, and security, when in reality the people support almost the exact opposite by preferring centralized services with almost no individual control or security. Most people don't even seem to notice that the FinTech services that are run in the Bitcoin space have essentially become as bad as the banks that Bitcoin sought to replace, and I don't mean bank as in "your own bank, Bitcoin (tm)" – more the kind that opportunistically exploits you for a profit because you have no better options. Worst still: at least actual banks tend to have some amount of oversight in how they're run, with some level of recoverability if something goes wrong. With centralized, cryptocurrency FinTech the operator is essentially saying to a crowd of hackers how much semi-untraceable, pseudo-anonymous assets they have to irrevocably steal and since anyone can start a FinTech company based on blockchains -- we've even had some companies that were run by people barely out of high school. Truly, the fact that no one even questions this as a security model for FinTech in the Bitcoin space is absurd. But they don't: which is why its easy for me to predict at least 5 major FinTech hacks in the Bitcoin space for 2017. I'll update this post when they happen.