Pyramid schemes don't work as well when money isn't free. I think that's what it comes down to.

You know, it's somewhat ironic when you take a step back and look at it. The entire premise of cryptocurrency was built on the foundation of decentralization. Yet here we are, gravitating towards centralized exchanges en masse. It's like we've veered completely off course. The allure of profit seems to have eclipsed our memory of the fundamental ethos behind crypto. It feels as though we've witnessed the death of the original crypto vision. Quite a bitter pill to swallow, isn't it? Yeah, I’d say it’s dead.

I think that as long as it is the easiest way to solving a real world problem, it isn't going anywhere. If you are in the USA thinking it's just easier to PayPal your friends and get a bank loan to exercise the value of your assets, you are missing the point. There are places people live where there is a minefield of obstacles set up to stop you from transacting and accumulating usable wealth. Bitcoin and defi work in these places.. legal or not, it's hard to stop.

Maybe enough people figured out that crypto isn't really distrubuted and that a decentralized currency which utilizes distributed, cryptographic validation is a strictly bad idea.