Trust requires us to give leverage to centralized authorities over our critical records. If you deposit money in a bank, they can unilaterally decide that you can't withdraw it today. Their systems can be down. They can be closed at a time you want access to your money, etc. Or the person at the front desk can simply not like you, and if they're the only branch in town, you're out of luck.
Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking).
Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.
Critically, trust like this comes from scale. The likelihood of a bank screwing you personally over diminishes as the bank grows larger. In other contexts, people call this a network effect, and it is an anti-competitive moat. Even if we completely trust the bank, which we don't, this anti-competitive moat leads to all sorts of problems, like stagnation of service quality (look how long it took us to get same day wire transfers and decent quality online banking).
Decentralized systems democratize trust. They break anti-competitive network effect driven moats. This is a good thing, even if we completely trust our centralized authorities, which again, we should not.