As happens all too often, I'm late to the party and just today find myself reading your fine article. You've said:

"However, the entire POINT of Satoshi’s innovation was to find a way to free us from the centralized system where Vampire Squids who are, to quote Taibbi once more, "relentlessly jamming their blood funnels into anything that smells like money.""

Yes, the entire point. Liberation from the damn banksters and the shadow powers that be who insist on running the world.

"Now more than ever, the importance of having DEX (decentralized exchanges) is important if we don’t want to see the slow process of centralization take hold and spread across the entire market."

Spot on. The DEXs already make it possible to buy and sell as long as we remain entirely within the cryptosphere. However, during "the transition," we still have this desperate need for fiat gateways that enable us to do mundane things like pay the rent and buy the groceries.

I've suggested in a previous article that we do this ourselves, and that we use existing private tools like http://localbitcoins.com rather than use the exchanges that increasingly want to probe our colons for information.

Mass adoption is a double-edged sword. The faster it happens, the faster we can subsist entirely using crypto. However, those who control the perception of the masses will also very likely determine which cryptocurrencies they ultimately adopt. And now I have the plot for my entry into your latest contest. ;)

Thanks for a great article, however late I may have found it. ;)

😄😇😄