Topic: Do you think that there will ever be an effort to boycott centralized exchanges? (Read 357 times)

The FTX collapse wasn't enough to warn people to boycott CEX. The popularity of Binance is an uphill battle for those who are not aware of what is happening. Coinbase, Kraken, or OKX has money to promote themselves to a wider audience.

Every bear market will just have to come with a disaster made by CEX making investors pay the price first before they learn how faulty the centralized exchanges are. One day, these CEX could just cancel/suspend accounts since they have the KYC data.

Is that not enough grounds in itself though? If power is continually spoon fed to them in comparison to a stand that collapses their empire (and unfortunately those who do not exit in time) then is that not worth it in comparison to eventually, they are hacked or they run off with 100% of what they hold at that time?

I do definitely see your point too don't worry. If a very successful boycott occurred, there is not really much stopping them from just pulling the rug for the reason that there is a boycott going on and would probably result in loss.

After watching all of the posts here, it is a very intriguing prospect to form some sort of a campaign, for fun and for the serious attempt at shifting people away from CEXs. Right now, it is not the time and nor do I have the time...but maybe one day 

Thank you all for posting everyone. There have been some awesome replies here. I do hope to reply to most people/everyone individually when I have some time one day!

I don't think so, and let's not forget that crypto coins were a success in the days of p2p and decentralized exchanges, and boycotting a centralized exchange today will be saying that the majority of users actually use a Cex to buy and sell their coins. Btw on what grounds will the boycott be because these guys pretty much aren't for the idea that they are held liable for whatever happens to our coins, so basically this is a losing battle.

If there is any possible way to boycotting the centralised exchange, it would have long been accomplished. So as there is disadvantages attached likewise too there is advantage. Centralised exchange has made it possible for easy access to Crypto currencies globally not only did it play that role, centralised exchange also aided in the fast circulation of Crypto currencies globally that every nation without Crypto restrictions are owners of Crypto currencies either through purchase from centralised exchange or gifts as a reward for job done.

Although the Crypto market has experienced some  some set back since last year as a result of the activities of centralised exchanges which has caused damages and wrecked investors down the lane overnight.

Nevertheless, what can be easily and simply achieved is the popular phrase "not your coin,not your keys" if every holder of Crypto takes this into consideration, I do not think centralised exchanges would have their way in commiting some nefarious act with investors funds and assets.

The possibility is very remote, the majority of traders are not educated enough to handle trading brought by decentralized exchanges, on the decentralized exchange you have to deal with at least 4 chains, and you have to cross chains you are left on your own if there are issues on your transaction, whereas on centralize exchange you have support to rely on any issue you encounter.

So many bad things happened in the centralized exchange industry but there are no moves to boycott these centralized exchanges, the only option has been to pick a centralized exchange with the least risk and with a good reputation.

I don't know. I remain skeptical. Who would be leading this movement of boycotting centralized exchanges? It looks to me as if a water bottle company was trying to boycott Coca Cola. Good luck with that. Coke has become such an integral part of life that you are surrounded by it all the time. You see it on TV, hear about it on the radio, see ads on the Internet, billboards, sports venues...

Some people from my friend circle who aren't into crypto have still heard about Binance and know what it is. That's the power of advertising. They are also the shirt sponsor or Lazio. CEXs are advertised on stadiums all over the world and people see that. They have a huge advantage and plenty of money to throw around. That's a dangerous combination. When someone decides to try out bitcoin or crypto for the first time, those names they saw on ads will be the first brands they will test.

You can learn about DEXs only when you dig a lot deeper. But since most people prefer simplicity and speed over safety and privacy, they will stick to their CEXs. Especially if their first experience wasn't a negative one.

You win some, and you lose some. Some DEXs might have higher trading fees but they don't charge withdrawal fees. All CEXs have withdrawal fees. I think that little bit of extra money spent is well worth it if you don't have to worry about your accounts being hacked or your private data leaking or being sold somewhere. 

I am not such expert but I will say that there could not be Compaign run where we might see such things against centralized exchanges. And these exchanges are part of our crypto community. And they will contribute a lot.

Yes there will be such effort created among the cryptocurrency users and traders when they become victims of centralized exchange hacks and scams. But until now even biggest scam not affected the majority of users much who knows where to keep their cryptocurrencies so for now I don't see any such kind of revolution among the community and also there is no perfect alternative there so people are forced to use centralized exchanges even though they really don't want to.

What we have seen recently was the call to withdraw coins from exchanges though. Although I'm not really sure who in the media was telling people to withdraw coins from exchanges, it seems to have worked when billions were coming out from Binance.

DEX is not very common for regular users, these guys don't want to be responsible for thier own assets. But the swap exchanges like Uniswap and 1inch are being used by millions of us already.

I think an effective boycott campaign against CEXs is difficult at the moment, CEXs offer a wide variety of services and have a much larger trading volume than DEXs.

Don't forget also the higher fees in DEXs compared to CEXs.

Also, DEXs do not have flexibility in trading, you are forced to work on a specific network and pay specific fees, for example, you work on the Ethereum network and pay fees in Ethereum only, the same for the Binance network or others. This is not necessary in CEXs.

There are other problems with DEXs such as, poor liquidity which leads to a significant increase in price impact. Also sometimes the slippage is big in some coins or tokens.

In short, DEXs are not yet mature enough to replace CEXs.

I believe it would be good if happens, but it is highly unlikely it will ever happen, because each day that passes, even though adoption and number of new users of Bitcoin increase, those new people do not necessarily know or share the values of Bitcoin about key holding and P2P.

For example, I have a cousin who (out of curiosity) created an account on Binance to buy some crypto, and that is all he did. He does not know what cryptography is, does not know what priv and pubs keys are, etc etc. That kind of people just wants liquidity and some warranty over their funds. For an effective boycott to happen, we would need more educated people and some scandal that sparked public outrage, I am afraid.

I think if there will be another instance that a huge hack will happen from another reputable exchange or another incident just as the FTX. This will drive many users to believe that they're no longer really safe at all and that will be a movement of volunteerism to get out of these centralized platforms. I really think that a news like this will trigger the community again, at least for us here, we do understand how these centralized exchanges work but outside the forum and mostly those that don't have a community but is in crypto, they'll have the idea then.

There's no news about that on mainstream media and in the Cryptocurrency community there are no moves to do that, but strongly advise everyone to not store their coins on exchanges and not your key, not your coins, how can we do that we are relying on Centralized exchange to trade our coins when there's a little complication on using a decentralized exchanges
The investing community is so used to using the banking system that they carry this in trading in Cryptocurrency, they want third parties to take care of everything.

The sad thing is, people actually need them centralized exchanges just as they need banks and other centralized entities. It is because people are too stupid to take responsibility for their own actions. They always make mistakes and seek help from somebody smarter to fix their mistakes.

See the IQ map of every country. Only a few European countries and Japan have the average IQ above 100 points. The rest of the world is below 100. 

No. People will always choose convenience over complex but safe way of trading. CEX offers a lot of advantage against CEX except for not controlling the private key.

The }not your keys not your coins” slogan is already existing for long time yet people still use CEX to store. People will always fall for there greed since CEX has a lot of ways to attract user to use it through bonuse, giveaways and other program that incentivize use of CEX. This kind campaign is very hard to implement to all user or even to the majority only.

Boycotting centralized exchange would be a decision made in real time. However, I am worried about how many traders are concerned about which exchange they are using. The worst exchange I've seen among many users. Though it is impossible to completely boycott centralized exchanges, we can move our holdings to non-custodial wallets to secure our funds. As a result, we can avoid a lot of drama. To be honest, we are still not safe, because in the event of an accident, the entire crypto market collapses, and we lose our holding value.

Good comparison, it's complicated for newbies and for many of us interacting with a decentralized exchange and on many chains, just like on fiats and banks, centralized makes it easy for us, it's like they are serving it all to us in a silver platter, this is the price we have to pay because of mainstream adoption they did not integrate Cryptocurrency in their system but rather, they integrate their system in Cryptocurrency, we will be like this, I don't see any effort to boycott centralized exchanges succeeding in a long term, how I wish it will.
It's only a matter of time before we'll all start trading on CEX again.

Bitcoin and the entire crypto economy is far away for the real adoption. In my opinion the real adoption will only be achieved when there will be only crypto exists for your daily life trades. These days we have fiat as digital forms by paypal, visa/debit/credit cards and other digital wallets. When you are buying a bottle of water you are paying by either cash, or by card. When you are buying something online you are paying either by paypal, or visa debit or credit card. It's common for everyone. Only a very small group of people are trying to find alternatives and people like you and me and us are using crypto whenever we have chance to pay for something.

Real adoption will be when these small group of people will become the common people. Right now these centralized exchanges are just helping us to be in crypto and play with it only.

Holding BTC in a centralized exchange is only convenient for BTC users who do not know how important self custody of their keys is, and how easy it is for them to write their recovery phrase and keep it safe. Handing over your money to someone to keep for you has to be less convenient than holding your money yourself in your own custody; in my humble opinion, any money that is not for active trading should be moved into the owners own wallet.

I don't think I can support that given that there's no clear alternative, and if Decentralized can serve the interest of new people coming in its easy for newbies to learn and teach them how to trade on a centralized exchange than using a decentralized exchange, the point here is the easiness of use and familiarity I would have to change the chain on my metamask to be able to transact from one chain to another when centralized exchange can do this for me on their platform.

It's already happening and people withdraw record number of Bitcoins from centralized exchanges after collapse of FTX and rumors about Binance exchange
Problem is that most of the people don't know what to do next and they think that using decentralized exchanges like Bisq or other type of p2p trading is very hard and complicated, but they are wrong about it.
I would also like to see more simple dumb-down cex alternatives for Bitcoin trading and I think developers are working on that with Lightning Network and atomic swaps.
It's much harder to deal with all the banking crap but people still do it every day.

Even with only bitcoin existing — though CEX usage would definitely be far lower because of far less retail speculation, CEXs will still be heavily used; though people would probably be using peer-to-peer exchanges a lot more. I remember LocalBitcoins having really high usage back then(I know they didn't require KYC back then, but yea).

No, not in any meaningful way. There are a lot of people here against them, but out there in the 'real world' they are just too easy and popular to use.
People want the magical internet money to just appear, they don't know and they don't want to know or care. So if they have to put in effort to make it work they will push back.

With the push back the people who know better can only go so far after that it's just talking to the wall.

So, the more knowledgeable people will try to educate people about not using them, but they are just too popular and any real effort to boycott them will just fail.
Once again, all the above in my opinion. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.

-Dave

for any boycott to succeed, it is necessary that at least 65%+ of the users participate in it. At the same time, they are ready to boycott for a long period of time, often to their own detriment. it is certainly not feasible.
I personally think the problem is that currently, all CEXs offer many options they don't just stick to their exchange priority. For example, Binance has many features like Spot Trading, Margin Trading, Derivatives Trading, Leveraged Tokens, NFT Marketplace, Strategy Trading, OTC Portal, Binance Convert, Auto Invest, DeFi Staking, Dual Investment, Binance Pool, Binance Card, Binance Launchpad, Binance Launchpool...
I think they can certainly be removed from the CEX list, they are more of a trading/investment platform. yes, this is not the case only with Binance. All so-called CEXs use a similar business model.

Just think centralized exchange is similar like banks and fiat currency, does there's a bank collapse? yes, does there's a fiat currency collapse? yes. But does all of banks and fiat currency are get boycott and there's no countries use fiat currency anymore? nope.

It will be same like centralized exchange, no matter what how bad it is and how many problem are comes from it, any countries only want centralized exchange because it's their another way to control their citizens and get money through tax.

Saying by using CEXs it helps bitcoin to be massively adopted is a joke. The currencucy has been designed without the need to a 3rd party and centralized. The only thing it does is to confirm the governments needs to regulate the market

Not even need to debate on the fact you're providing your personnal data for the KYC, because I understand some people don't give a fuck to privacy et al. I understand some people claim to not have a big amount on a CEX. That's just to feel less guilty.
Preaching decentralization and privacy, and using centralized exchanges, accepting the taxes and laws,...

...Very efficient decentralization
If you're using a CEX, I hope you won't complaint when the market will be even more regulated as it is currently. You won't be eligible to complain because you think you're paying too much taxes on your gains. You can't complain because you helped to get such situation.

Why should a group of devs create something while people aren't interested in decentralized stuff?

5$ to join an airdrop on a CEX
5$ to watch a video on coinbase.
10 cts to RT a cunt

And voilà, people are happy.  

I would also add that p2p is not safe.
Would you sell 10k usd to a lot of different people in p2p? One day you will see an exit scam.

The best is to use cex just to trade, and they are good for that. Then you just withdrawal.  Don't hold crypto in cex. Simple as that.

Are there any moves to boycott centralized exchange, will it hold and gain momentum? there's risk in trading on Centralized exchanges but when it comes to the advantages and disadvantages of trading on exchanges traders prefer the advantages brought by trading on centralized exchanges, people who think that they should boycott CEX needs to realize that many DEXes don't support dollar-to-crypto trades, and DEXs only support cryptos on one single blockchain compared to CEX's who can support multiple chains, enabling trading one token from a different chain to another token on another chain.


Right now I don't see that happening the industry has so many tokens on multiple chains and they can only be housed on a Centralized exchange.

Maybe, first bitcoin has to be the only crypto left. CEX seems to have become the main resource supporting the crypto industry to continue to grow. Altcoins that are listed on certain CEXs can be considered an indicator that more people will come. On this basis, the boycott attempt probably won't have much power of support as long as bitcoin is not alone.

Remember that people didn't just jump into this space initially thanks to bitcoin even though bitcoin was ultimately their end goal.

I'm pretty sure this won't be even remotely possible as the majority of crypto-users are still dependent on CEXs for their day to day trading. It's where the most volume is, most services offered as well such as P2P and Fiat on-ramps, etc. Some CEX even have flexible savings while most DEX platform that offers similar service just locks your coin/token for a specific period.

I also feel like main problem is that most DEXs only offer a limited amount of services; trade, vaults, farms and that's it. Although you can use various services, they are not on just one platform, you would need to have multiple tabs open on your browser to use them. CEXs offers plenty of services and in some instances, all top services are in one big CEX; not to mention perks for just trading on their platforms. You basically get more bonuses out of CEXs than DEXs.

Unless crypto-adoption is in a full swing, meaning, we can just go to a store and pay with any crypto or trade freely with it without the need of a P2P service that some CEXs offers, and DEXs caught up to all the services and perks offered by CEXs, this is not possible as only a limited amount of people would end up participating.

Boycotting of CEXs have been around for a good while now. It's just that for instances like this, boycotting can only do so much. CEXs are still the most convenient way of buying/selling and holding bitcoin/crypto hence it will be the most used platform variant.

Yes this is true. There is a severe lack of decentralized P2P services for fiat services that are anywhere near as convenient or easy to use as centralized options. Once this gap is filled the chance might grow stronger.


In my opinion, manipulation would be a well-versed activity for centralized exchange "elites" (if you will) by now. The discussion and suspicion of these activities date back as far as I remember. We should be suspicious that there is no talk about it now.


I agree. Decentralized exchanges are greatly improving in terms of usability. Your point about P2P services/fiat-related services are definitely a strong point of improvement if CEXs were to be able to be boycotted successfully.

Don't forget these centralized exchanges allow people to easily buy and sell their crypto. P2P is just not that easy.

Centralized exchanges are fine but we need to understand that a monopoly business model is not good for anything. I see some exchanges are having large share of exchange industry which is obviously bad. They will start manipulating the crypto users very soon if they have not started yet.

If you and me start avoiding it then it starts. But before that we need to ensure that there are enough decentralized exchanges available and accepted by the community.

I think that this is the only way to majorly effective way to remove exploitative profiteers from the market, stop exit scams and increase transparency of trading activity. As new perpetual/margin trading options become available, like GMX and Dydx (which is unconvincingly completely decentralized, however a seemingly better option than CEXs), the possibility to boycott CEXs becomes more possible.

Do you think an effective boycott campaign against CEXs could happen? What do you think would be needed to do so, other than the manpower? Or do you think that the tentacles have wrapped themselves too far around the industry?