These comments strike me as very much against the ethos of cryptocurrencies, which is to say, using a publicly available ledger with access governed by rules de

These comments strike me as very much against the ethos of cryptocurrencies, which is to say, using a publicly available ledger with access governed by rules democratically set by the majority of nodes instead of many secret private ledgers governed by civil institutions. Counterparty risk? What counterparty risk? The minute the funds leave your wallet governed by your private keys then you no longer have control. The moment you transfer funds then they no longer belong to you. By design! Downtime? What downtime? If individual nodes go offline then the network continues to function. Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol. By design! Perhaps instead of trying to hack centralized banking models onto decentralized currencies we should be using decentralized models to fit the currency. Perhaps, instead of Coinbase claiming to hold Bitcoin in the name of account holders, it should facilitate the immediate transfer of Bitcoin to the private wallets of people who are purchasing it and refuse purchases of people without wallets set up. Perhaps Coinbase should allow transaction fees to skyrocket as a result (even more than they have currently), due to not processing transactions off-chain, and that this would be fine, because it would push demand towards cryptocurrencies with lower fees. Bitcoin exchanges won't mature until they're less like traditional stock brokers and more like BitTorrent trackers - they don't actually host the files or the money, but tell you where to find people who do, who you can exchange with directly in a decentralized way.