I thought the whole point of a decentralised ledger was not needing companies like PayPal…

This point is conveniently missing. There's simply more money to be made! Now get out of here with your nonsense ideas of decentralizing money. It's bad for business.

The point of cash is that it represents transferrable value that doesn't require an intermediary between you and the person you're transacting with. And yet, banks and credit card companies exist and deal with cash. This does not mean that cash is a useless concept.

That is the point! You don't need companies like Paypal... Companies often offer services that are "not needed" because people like convenience, ease of use, etc.

You don't need Paypal to use Bitcoin, but there's nothing in the spec that prohibits it.

The power of not needing companies like PayPal does not preclude them from offering services that ease its use.

The benefit comes from having the option to go elsewhere. A business that cannot lock you in is more likely to try to retain your custom by offering a good service.

I thought the point was more that you can't be required to use companies like PayPal in order to use the underlying technology.

PayPal has been slowly circling the drain for years, grasping at highly questionable Hail Mary's like crypto coins.

Or Coinbase, or Cash App, or Venmo, or any of the other random places you can buy cryptocurrency. If it's not on the blockchain, it's not cryptocurrency; it's just an IOU until you withdraw to a private wallet.

It's not that simple, there's a niuance there - tradeoffs are to to be made if we want to have a decentralized system; it will not scale to the whole planet, if running a node is accessible; and it must be so, otherwise it's not decentralized.

The reality is, we will have a mix of custodian - through third-party - and self-sovereign usage; depending on the context and user's skill

There is a beautiful quote about this that captures an essential process within our economic system.

> Under capitalism necessities become luxuries, while luxuries become false necessities. Umair Haque

The Internet is decentralized but most of us use ISPs to connect to it. Most of can't access the Internet without these companies.

In practice, the word "decentralized" just speaks to whether anyone can join in the protocol if they want. But it doesn't mean the protocol is easy to implement.

Yeah, but Bitcoins ledger is shit.

better call up the Bitcoin CEO and Vitalik to voice your complaints that a third party you don't have to use at all is using your favorite network

It’s a grift, that’s why. Pedophile protector administration has silently dropped all of the regulatory lawsuits related to digital currency. There is minimal or no oversight right now. The pedophile in chief and family himself have also rug pulled their own tokens and not many people are caring.

I used to work at a few big banks, and because of the "friendly" nature of digital currencies. The traditional banking entities are trying to get in on the grift while they can.