Some of the currencies like Farmers and Merchants were little trade organizations in small towns. They were just groups of Farmers and Merchants who came together to create little lending pools. That's pretty decentralized.

Ethnic communities, in the United States still create little underground lending pools like this, today. These "unbanked" people get a group of 10 people together and they get pen and paper and they create a "ledger". Each of the 10 people all create their own ledger and everybody is "witnessing" it, so nobody can cheat each other. That creates "consensus". Its like a blockchain on paper.

There were literally thousands of currencies in the United States. How much more decentralized does it need to be to be considered decentralized? Centralization was born out of centralized governments. Prior to centralized economics there had to centralized politics. Think of all of the tribal governments who were decentralized all over the world. Most of these tribes were so small that they didn't even use money because they used "I owe you".

Which should remind people that debt was born before money and even debt was decentralized. For example, I would remember in my brain how much I owed you and you would remember in your brain how much you were owed. Just like blocks needed to be validated by the network to get a consensus. If I owed you money and you and I disagreed how much each owed. Then we might go look for a witness who observed the handshake deal. Again, we are looking for consensus and validation of the ledger. This works when there are very few transactions, but it doesn't work at scale. You can't run a modern economy in your mind.

Even the new blockchains are moving a way from full decentralization because it takes too long for each node to validate every single block in the entire chain. The newer blockchains are moving toward partial validation of their "corner" of the chain. These are "trust" nodes or validators. Again, the blockchain is repeating some of the mistakes of traditional money system and they are implementing similar solutions.

I am all about rebuilding the world in crypto. We just need to build back better and learn from the mistakes of the past.