High gas fees are the biggest barrier to adoption BY FAR

As a half tech-literate layman whose been screwed by inflation and tried to get into crypto this past year Im going to be calling out what I think is a HUGE hypocrisy right now - I find it is incredibly out of touch for so many people in this sub to preach about self-custody and adoption while expecting the average person to put up with high gas fees. Im defining "high gas fees" as higher than the current visa/mastercard fees because that's what defi is competing against. Do you really expect people investing thousands of dollars to pay 10s of dollars in gas fees per transaction during what we currently call "busy" times?

Layer 2s

From what I've seen about discussions about this, people always point to layer 2 solutions to reduce these fees. Aside from being yet another difficulty to deal with, layer 2 solutions are literally centralized services, which immediately defeats ALL the benefits of crypto.

If you think any layer 2 is going to upkeep maintenance for free and that those running layer 2s have no financial incentive to screw you, I dont even know why you're in defi to begin with. Let's not pretend there havent been MAJOR layer 2 scandals with major losses for people even in the last year I've been here. You would somehow have to have a decentralized method of maintaining these layer 2s, but with what... layer 3s then 4s?

The true solution is to have the layer 1 be completely user friendly and completely decentralized. From what I've researched about this topic, Vitalik himself stated that centralized services are not the end-game (Last paragraph), in response to useage of centralized layer 2 services, and the more that is built on centralized services, the harder it will be to move away.

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