If a CEX could be trusted to hold your funds, Satoshi Nakamoto would have never created Bitcoin

Satoshi was not just a software engineer and a computer scientist. Its fair to say that on top of this he was an inventor. He is the one who finally solved the problem that others have been trying to for thousands of years before him.

The use of currency is a defining feature of a civilized community. It is what allows people to specialize, and efficiently trade their goods to what other people have produced. Different communities have used all kinds of different items for this. Some used a common consumable such as grains of wheat. Some used animal hides. Some used metals like copper, silver or gold. Whatever they used, all had the necessary common traits. The currency was scarce and not trivially reproducible. If it wasn't, anyone could just gather or produce the currency for himself, making much more money than actual productive work would. The system would break down.

But all of these currencies also shared a common problem. Some of them to a grater degree than others. The currency was not convenient. Examples of this is the currency rotting, degrading or being hard to divide, store, measure or transport.

During the thousands of years, many societies independently came up with a similar solution to this... Until the solution eventually always failed. Lets have a central authority print convenient notes, and promise to keep them scarce!. Sigh. I guess everyone in this subreddit knows the problem here: The central authority will deceive the people, and print more currency for themselves than they were supposed to. The most notable central authority guilty of this is of course the United States government. They promised to only print an equal amount of dollars, as what was redeemable for gold in Fort Knox. They lied. They printed more. They grew richer. Everyone else became more poor. You simply could not trust any authority, no matter how big or democratic they are supposed to be.

What mankind had been yearning for since the dawn of time is currency that is:

1. Scarce

2. Convenient

3. Trustless

There simply was nothing in existence that ticked all of these marks... But that does not mean that such a thing is impossible to exist. Technology was advancing. The internet was becoming more common. People started to have greater access to computing devices. The only thing that was missing was an inventor, who could come up with a solution. Of course that man is now known as Satshi Nakamoto, when he revealed Bitcoin to the world. It was

1. Strictly limited in supply

2. Never rots. Divides into minuscule, trivially measurable amounts. Can be given to anyone in front of you, or other side of the planet with a push of a button.

3. Doesn't require the trust of anything or anyone. Every user can verify the authenticity of transaction, and the scarcity of the currency.

And the problem was finally solved. And everyone in the crypto community lived happily ever after...

But wait!!! Did you know that there is this really cool website? A centralized crypto exchange! I just saw an ad for it! You simply send them fiat or crypto, and they will show you a number on their website! You can do all kinds of cool things with this number on their website! And its safe too. They would NEVER sell more crypto than what they actually have. The CEO of the website said that they have 1:1 equivalent of crypto in their storage! Besides, the company is so big anyway. A big organization surely wouldnt lie to its customers about these things!

You see where I'm going here? Trusting a centralized authority to manage crypto is antithetical to the entire premise of its existence. And unless mankind suddenly changed, they will deceive their users. And it will become very expensive to everyone involved, except for of course the people in charge of the CEX.