Okay, but you already have a business relationship with your exchange. so there are fewer points of failure. >I have USDT that is in my own wallet and not on a

Okay, but you already have a business relationship with your exchange. so there are fewer points of failure. >I have USDT that is in my own wallet and not on an exchange that I could send directly to you if I wanted. I suppose, but this "Tether" currency is still minted by a centralized entity. It could be worthless tomorrow. I don't see how self-custodialship of this centralized monopoly money matters. You might as well just use a centralized currency if you trust this centralized entity not to inflate the currency. When I use an exchange-backed currency like BUSD, USDC or Kraken's USD, I don't intend to exchange it peer-to-peer at all. The whole point of exchange in the first place is that you use the cryptocurrencies for peer-to-peer transfers. The only thing a stablecoin has to do is: 1) Accept (cash, bank, CC) deposits 2) Allow (cash, bank, CC) withdrawls 3) Allow me to exchange it for cryptocurrency with others 4) Don't lose my money in the process If you trust some institution to do #1-3, why would you want to have some other, less credible institution to handle #4 as well?