Do you think the average user cares about centralization ?
I had this argument recently with someone else on this forum: I think there is a lot of indication why centralized systems which "are easier to use" are largely preferred over decentralized systems, even if those last ones give you a higher sense of freedom. This is one of the reasons why I think that decentralized crypto currencies will never take over the fiat system, or even come close. (another reason is of course that most crypto has fallen in a speculative deflationary spiral).
When we look at several decentralized systems that existed before, and that have fallen out of favour, we find:
1) the internet structure
The internet had a largely decentralized structure in the beginning. In fact, it was its main invention ! The internet was invented as a military protocol to not have a single point of failure, let us not forget that. The inventors of the internet had a decentralized P2P mesh structure in mind, so that when you bomb 2/3 of the network, the remaining 1/3 is still functioning. Well, we see that, even though there is still some heritage of that, economies of scale have driven the structure of a mesh in rather wheel-and-spokes hierarchies, and very often, for your internet access, you rely on just a few commercial options. You don't connect with a wire to your neighbours, who connect to their neighbours who ....
The internet is not entirely centralized either, there is no single boss of the internet, but there are main points of failure, where law enforcement can impose its rules and "look at everything", which wouldn't be the case in a true peer-to-peer network as it was intended. It is not a mesh.
2) internet social content
the internet allows you to set up your own little web server at home. You are entirely the master of that content. You can run your own blog, and nobody can censor you (apart from the above centralization, which can censor your IP). Almost nobody does (apart from people having content on Tor hidden servers). People use centralized providers of these services, where they take an account and pay a modest sum for the service provided, or accept their personal information to be commercialized to get free access.
3) using centralized services like facebook. Everything you do on facebook, you could do it with a home-installed blog. The whole idea of the internet was to allow people to link content ; you could give restricted access to different users. People prefer a centralized big company to do that for them.
4) discussion. Usenet was a decentralized discussion system, that was entirely censor-resistant. People dropped it to go to centralized discussion forums, because at least, there was a central boss (the admin) and his police (moderators) that kept rule and order.
5) storage. You can buy huge amounts of storage for little money. People put their stuff on the centralized "cloud" for easiness of access, and not to be bothered.
In all these categories, there are minorities sticking to their freedom and doing the decentralized thing. But they are not the mainstream.
So, for payment systems, it is similar. It is even worse, because trustless decentralized payment systems have an *increasing burden* on users as the network grows. In fact, this is somewhat similar to usenet, which also had an increasing burden when its network became large (and ended up crumbling under it, with daily volumes of messages of several bitcoin block chains a day).
A centralized system that works sufficiently well to allow people to do their thing, even if they are moderately badly exploited, seems in general to be preferred by the mainstream public, rather than the little bit of hassle of doing a decentralized thing yourself and taking responsibility for it.
