I hate going through 3rd parties for payments. The two things that shouldn't exist in bitcoin are the mining pools and the exchanges. Reason is because they are making bitcoin centralized. All the BTC are going through the biggest exchanges and all the computing power is gathered together in the largest mining pools. If the banks felt threatened and bitcoin became outlawed all the exchanges would be shut down and you wouldn't be able to exchange your fiat for bitcoin. If the largest mining pools were hijacked then there is the possibility that the network could be overtaken because that's where the majority of the computing power is. We need a decentralized exchange and decentralized mining. When we have those things bitcoin will be much more stable in my opinion.
The problem is that mining pools are the only interesting option for people which doesn't have a mining rig.
