Some of the biggest scams in crypto were hoisted on people under one simple pretext:
"But you can self-host your own node!"
This simple red herring has enabled all kinds of compromises to our sovereignty when using crypto.
Now first, let me be clear: self-hosting is great. Running your own node is great. Compared with having to trust companies to not screw you over, it's absolutely massive.
However, the "you can self-host" distraction actually harms the practical decentralization and sovereignty of the space in two key ways:
1) Not Everyone Needs to Run a Node!
The entire novel innovation of crypto is a decentralized, unified, guaranteed network that remains censorship resistant.
The whole point of this is that you don't need to self-host to have censorship-resistance guarantees. You can just use the self-funded, self-running decentralized network.
By deliberately engineering protocols like Bitcoin (and to a lesser extent, Ethereum) in order to make node-running accessible for hobbyists, everyday transactions and actual use by said hobbyists became out of reach.
In other words, people were made to be able to run nodes to validate transactions they themselves can't afford.
2) Ignore Centralization If You CAN Self-Host
The even darker part: by giving a self-hosting option, users are distracted from the blatant centralization and censorship vectors facing 99% of users.
A great example of this is Lightning, where anyone can theoretically run their own node and manage their own payment channels in a fully peer-to-peer way. But practically, it's immensely clunky, technical, involved, and expensive.
As a result, almost all users use fully-custodial systems, or at best extremely-centralized semi-custodial services, and this goes ignored because theoretically anyone can self-host.
The Real Holy Grail: No Need to Self-Host
The real innovation we should be striving for: no need to self-host!
The most innovative freedom projects take the core foundational principle of crypto that started with Bitcoin: that the system makes it so that honest miners will run a censorship-resistant network without all participants having to run miners themselves.
They take this foundation, and apply the principle to every level of the stack.
Essentially, anywhere in the entire experience of an average user where there's a company or centralized service in there that they need to trust, find a way to decentralize it, without requiring the user to self-host.
We've already made amazing progress on this already, and we can keep doing better.
In fact, this post is already on two decentralized blockchains that I don't have to self-host to guarantee access: here on Hive, and on Dash.
But we have to learn to avoid the self-host red herring.