I'm not disputing that you can do those things. But I'm saying that when a particular provider is sufficiently powerful, they have the capability to make those options less appealing, either malevolently or inadvertently.
You could move your open source project away from GitHub, but if GitHub is sufficiently popular that most people don't understand how the patch system works in git, and hence don't know how to contribute without using the affordances that GitHub offers, then you will incur a cost by doing so.
The point I'm making is that if the majority of people using a decentralized system via a centralized wrapper, and if interaction with those people is a priority, then it is possible for the provider of that centralized wrapper to make it harder for you to interact with their customers without yourself using the centralized wrapper. The more they do so, the less value there is to you (the decentralized user) in the millions/billions of people using decentralized service X through centralized wrapper Y, because they're effectively unreachable unless you also use said centralized wrapper.
This can happen by continuing to use the decentralized infrastructure, but penalizing participants who aren't accessing the infrastructure through a popular system. Alternatively, it can happen by having the decentralized infrastructure co-opted, so even though the service to some extent interacts with it, most user interaction actually exists entirely within the centralized system.
I mean, it doesn't seem crazy for me to imagine a world in which (eg) as a Coinbase user there's some monetary advantage to receiving payments from Coinbase members vs the wider Bitcoin world. At which point maybe merchants want you to pay via "Coinbase Send" (or w/e this hypothetical service is called) rather than pure Bitcoin transactions. At which point, sure, Bitcoin is the underlying unit of value, but no-one is actually using Bitcoin transactions (Coinbase is just moving around their internal accounting DB records), and hence the fact that things are counted in Bitcoin is basically a historical artifact.
I have no idea what will happen. My argument is just that I don't think that it is impossible for decentralized systems to be functionally neutered when people mostly interact with them through centralized wrappers.
You could move your open source project away from GitHub, but if GitHub is sufficiently popular that most people don't understand how the patch system works in git, and hence don't know how to contribute without using the affordances that GitHub offers, then you will incur a cost by doing so.
The point I'm making is that if the majority of people using a decentralized system via a centralized wrapper, and if interaction with those people is a priority, then it is possible for the provider of that centralized wrapper to make it harder for you to interact with their customers without yourself using the centralized wrapper. The more they do so, the less value there is to you (the decentralized user) in the millions/billions of people using decentralized service X through centralized wrapper Y, because they're effectively unreachable unless you also use said centralized wrapper.
This can happen by continuing to use the decentralized infrastructure, but penalizing participants who aren't accessing the infrastructure through a popular system. Alternatively, it can happen by having the decentralized infrastructure co-opted, so even though the service to some extent interacts with it, most user interaction actually exists entirely within the centralized system.
I mean, it doesn't seem crazy for me to imagine a world in which (eg) as a Coinbase user there's some monetary advantage to receiving payments from Coinbase members vs the wider Bitcoin world. At which point maybe merchants want you to pay via "Coinbase Send" (or w/e this hypothetical service is called) rather than pure Bitcoin transactions. At which point, sure, Bitcoin is the underlying unit of value, but no-one is actually using Bitcoin transactions (Coinbase is just moving around their internal accounting DB records), and hence the fact that things are counted in Bitcoin is basically a historical artifact.
I have no idea what will happen. My argument is just that I don't think that it is impossible for decentralized systems to be functionally neutered when people mostly interact with them through centralized wrappers.