Not ironic, because nobody that has serious money in BTC cares about using it as a currency. It's a get-rich-quick scheme for regular people, and a way to launder money for everybody else. In both cases, you need a middleman.

Plenty of people with “serious money” use their cryptocurrency - be it as a currency or for whatever other purpose it was designed. In fact, they probably use it more than the average person since many of them made it from being a crypto developer.

In any case, there’s a big difference between “needing a middleman” to do something and leaving your funds with a middleman indefinitely. That’s like needing to use a taxi and paying with cash versus leaving your life savings with the taxi person so some day when you maybe want to use a taxi it’ll be easier.

That's because nobody treats it as a currency, but as a speculative commodity.

1. No one uses it as money. No one (within margin of error).

2. Bitcoin is very confusing and hard to learn about. But buying from an exchange makes it easy for normal people.

Even if it was viable to use bitcoin as a currency, I would still want to leave most of mine with a bank.

The point is that you don't need a bank/exchange/middleman with bitcoin. You just need the wallet key and password. Bitcoin can be stored on a post-it note.

Yeah. Just like with cash.

My point is I would rather have a team of people paid to make sure that post-it note doesn't get lost than try to keep it myself.