Yeah, I hear you. I am hoping they are just crutches to bootstrap bitcoin adoption. If bitcoins become popular, perhaps we can lose the crutches. Or perhaps we'll have tons of competing escrow businesses.
What is it with humans' tendency to centralise anyways? Here is democracy... now here's an all-powerful president and congressional oligarchy. Here is the industrial revolution to facilitate transportation of goods all around the countryside... now here are the giant megalopolises in which most of us now live. Here is the internet... now here's Gmail, the single location to email, and Facebook, the single location to put all of your personal data. Here are DVCSes... now here is github, a place to centralise all of our DVCS work.
Maybe there's just something fundamentally ingrained in human psychology that makes us converge like this.
> What is it with humans' tendency to centralise anyways?
I think it's less about human psychology and more about managing efficiency.
A well-run centralized system will always be more efficient than a well-run decentralized system, by virtue of having less overhead. Whether it's overhead from arranging logistics to one large city, instead of a hundred small cities, or overhead from interacting with one large federal government, instead of 50 small state governments.
> Maybe there's just something fundamentally ingrained in human psychology that makes us converge like this.
Or perhaps there are meetings in boardrooms where the upper echelon of a given sector of the economy work hand in hand with thinktanks, highly paid psychologist consultants, PR firms, journalists, and media executives(at the ownership level) to design and execute strategies that encourage whole populations to act against their best interests by entering into these sorts of centralized arrangements.
Why does everyone always jump to "human nature" as the explanation ? I'll tell you why it's because they have no visibility into the 10+ billion dollar/year PR industry that is operating in our midst. Human nature does factor into this though.. it's human nature to assume that you're not personally vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation, so people tend to write it off even though statistically speaking the odds are that they can be influenced, and are being influenced.
Businesses want to reduce risk, reduce overhead and maximize profits. Lenders want to reduce risk and maximize return. Customers want their assets protected and want fraudulent charges to be reversible. Other businesses in other countries want to know what to expect when dealing with businesses in yours. Having a known regulatory framework and a system of laws regarding commerce, trade and consumer protection facilitates the level of efficiency and complexity necessary to have the economies of scale we currently do.
Almost everything else you list is a matter of scale. As far as industrialization goes, all that industry requires an infrastructure, which itself requires an infrastructure, adjacency to materials, shipping, energy and a labor pool which won't be paid well enough to simply drive in to work from wherever. Even mere agriculture can be considered a centralization of hunting and gathering - as you needed one place to keep all the farms and the slaves and the temples and preferably all of that close to a river. It's not irrational. In fact, I believe the more difficult argument is in favor of decentralization - Bitcoin is attractive to speculators, scammers and hipsters but why would it be attractive to businesses or the average consumer without a proxy for the existing legal apparatus?
Gmail is not "the single location to email", it's simply the leader, there are still many email services out there, you can host your own email server if you want, it's (probably) not illegal. Is Google not an example of a free market working as intended? Surely, just because a free market suggests there should be competition, it doesn't imply there must be. You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to. Sure, everyone you know is probably on facebook but you're free to try to create your own social media site and compete, or simply not use it. The market decided on facebook, if you don't like it, well, too bad I guess. Github exists because someone decided an online version of git would be successful, and they were right, it is. The market chooses winners, either honestly or dishonestly, legally or extralegally, and eventually the winners dominate, which Facebook and Google do.
Centralization is prone to corruption... 2008 financial crisis ilustrated it very well worldwide...
Decentralization, while having a bigger overhead, also benefits from a bigger pool of contributors...
Example 1 - mathematics: if the europe-mathematics did not cooperate with other world-mathematics, they would limit their knowledge to only european findings, which would leave them reduced compared to the worldwide mathematics investigation
Example 2 - wikipedia: more updated and complete than many classic-editor-encyclopedias that were sold before wikipedia was made.
> Maybe there's just something fundamentally ingrained in human psychology that makes us converge like this.
Convenience/laziness, lack of concern about privacy, and social signalling help to explain the internet related centralisation examples you noted.
"Free", convenient and easy-to-use (and your privacy goes out the window) will win over inconvenient, marketed improperly, and slightly more difficult to use every time with the mass market.
What is it with humans' tendency to centralise anyways? Here is democracy... now here's an all-powerful president and congressional oligarchy. Here is the industrial revolution to facilitate transportation of goods all around the countryside... now here are the giant megalopolises in which most of us now live. Here is the internet... now here's Gmail, the single location to email, and Facebook, the single location to put all of your personal data. Here are DVCSes... now here is github, a place to centralise all of our DVCS work.
Maybe there's just something fundamentally ingrained in human psychology that makes us converge like this.