It is very misleading claim that bitcoin users do not need to trust centralized authority, in fact every one uses bitcoin is trusting this centralized protocol originally designed by Satoshi: Every miners, nodes, exchanges, merchants, users, no exception
What is very misleading? The protocol does not rely on any external authority that enforces it and its original creator is no longer around. In fact miners are free to alter the protocol but they have counter-incentive to do that in the form of block reward. To obtain that they have to keep sure that they keep on extending the longest chain.As for non-miners, they are interested that their transactions are safeguarded, and that is again provided by the longest chain.
Earlier attempts at making digital cash relied solely on cryptography, and had to implement a central trusted server, whereas Satoshi introduced
two economic incentives into the system (block subsidy and transaction fees) which made it possible for it operate in a decentralized manner.
Just as the block reward does away with the need of central authority who issues money and detects double spends, the existence of transaction fee market does away with the need of a central authority who dictates the upper block size limit.
But currently the protocol is the centralized control point, if you can persuade 12 large actors (5 mining pools, 5 exchanges, 1 web wallet and 1 payment processor) to adopt one specific protocol, then you basically control the majority of this ecosystem, anyone else has neglectable influence.
What you are saying here is simply not true, the effective governance of the protocol is far more distributed and nuanced then that. The major public mining pools also do not control the majority of the hashpower they serve.
The reason that it gives people hope that a political move might work is because the protocol is highly centralized, if we indeed have a very decentralized system then there will not be such difficulties like we see today. But you can not have freedom in selecting protocol, since that means you just created another alt-coin which will worth a little due to its inflation nature.
I completely disagree with your notion that the protocol is presently highly centralized, I think that it is working fine and as it was intended and that it just needs to grow in order to become more decentralized. This further highlights and contrasts the difference in vision.
The protocol indeed rely on large actors to enforces it. I would glad to see that the protocol itself is self-aware and reject any attempt to modify it, then we have a truly decentralized system without human interference. All the scaling solution will go off-chain, and I thing that will make bitcoin the most trustworthy/incorruptible monetary system on this planet.
I think that you are critically mistaken in your assertion that Bitcoin should work without human interference, proof of work after all relies on game theory which is based on human incentives, Bitcoin is ruled by the market, it is ruled by people, it is revolutionary because it puts the people in charge without their actually needing to be any humans in the center of power whom require "trust" and checks and balances that often fail to work. This quote I felt was sympathetic to you position, I hope that you will come to understand that Bitcoin depends on the actions of human beings who are a part of this intricate and great machine so to speak.
In my discussions with various members of Core, I have reached the conclusion that most of them simply disagree with the design of Bitcoin, which by design allows the consensus rules to be changed by a sufficient majority of miners and users, independent of what any group of technocrats wish.
It is important to remember not to attribute malice where ignorance is equally explanatory. All of the devs I engage with are very strong in cryptography and computer science, which may make them less accepting of the fact that at its core, Bitcoin relies in the economic self-interest of the masses to govern consensus, not a group of educated technocrats. As an educated technocrat myself I can understand the sentiment. It would be better if math and only math governed Bitcoin. But that's not how Bitcoin is actually governed.
At the end of the day, if social engineering and developer manipulation can kill Bitcoin, well then we're all betting on the wrong horse.
