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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

to trade it? You cannot trade or convert to cash unless you use some sort of exchange. If you want to go from something like BTC to Shibu you need an exchange. There are some decentlrized alternatives but the volume is tiny. BISQ still has absolute shit volume and hard to use. It's not intended for trading or cashing out large sums.

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It looks like Uniswap has more volume for ETH/USD than almost any other centralized exchange right now

https://twitter.com/haydenzadams/status/1592188164218707969?...

Does uniswap actually have a pair with USD, or is it "USD" that's actually a token someone else promises is redeemable for USD?

So you're telling me that all these people exchanges currencies non-stop 24/7? Why can't they have coins in their offline wallet and transfer them to the exchange only before the transaction?

On a similar (sort of) principle, I do not keep 100% savings on the bank account to which my ATM card is attached, I have a separate account where I keep most of my savings and move money between them once a month or when i need to buy something very expensive.

probably day traders. These are people who trade crypto daily, sometimes many times/day. depositing and withdrawing may take a long time, so easier to keep it on the exchange and accept the risk.

Because on-chain transactions are expensive and exchanges offer cheap off-chain transactions. If you could transact on-chain as cheaply as you can move money between a checking and savings account of course people would do that.

> Because on-chain transactions are expensive

For what chain? As far as I can tell, this is only true for ETH, and you can mitigate this by switching to a true L2, although not many of them are up to par yet.

All the top HFT firms are trading Bitcoin at this point and have been for years.

Yeah the second paragraph makes sense. I do the same thing. I have a lot of bank accounts because of a side hustle (think dozens). I don’t connect my main savings bank account with any of these. Just in case something goes wrong, it’s easier if everything public goes through one or two banks with low amounts of money and I only carry a lower balance debit card with me.

Sure, I get that. But why on earth keep all of it there? You can keep the majority of your crypto in a private address (hardware wallet, cold storage, metal plates…whatever) and only transfer/use as much as you’re willing to play/trade/convert.

Because crypto in cold storage doesn't earn interest and can't be used as collateral for a margin loan.

Crypto is full of people looking for to get rich quick with interest rates that are obvious ponzi schemes and/or by taking on insane leverage. They don't want to just put tokens in an offline wallet and watch the market prices.

Up until recently for ETH this was non tenable given the gas fees.

Have ETH gas fees come down since the move away from POW to POS?

They haven’t actually, I thought there was a relationship but in researching more I was wrong. Even more of a reason retail would opt for an exchange then.

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