My first real experience buying bitcoin back in 2013 was a nightmare. Buying bitcoin involved finding a back door through a virtual world of Second Life to a ATM that dispensed Bitcoin for Second Life money. I was hooked.
Eventually web based exchanges started popping up. Some of them shady, most of them with glaring security issues (engineered that way I suspect), and as 2014 rolled in we witnessed some of the largest crypto thefts involving millions. Yet bitcoin still survived on the backs of people with access to stash their money away from tyrannical governments withdrawing their hard earned money from their bank accounts. At the time Greece was going though financial ruin as is Venezuela , countless regions in South America as well as Indonesia.
With the decentralized exchanges I feel that the crypto community is finally answering the problem of shady practices of private centralized exchanges, the exchanges that found a niche in hidden fees, trade bots with handicap trading speeds, and loose or unknown information on the owner and developers and the actual asset value holdings of such exchanges. These shady exchanges were also vulnerable to promoting individuals through troll boxes that were responsible for leading pump and dump scams. I could make an entire blog about the shady practices I have seen from private exchanges from the most popular and trusted to the tor only accessible markets.
I highly recommend people that want to become part of an exchange and part of the crypto community get involved in DEX such as:
OpenLedger.io
and
Crypto-bridge.org
Get in early, as I believe the future of trading wont necessary be in trading Alt coins but actually holding Coins that represent the exchange and its volume.