All central authorities are built on trust, fear, or complacency. Americans are complacent with the credit card system and trust it for the most part. The Experian breach has shown that breaches of trust are easily overlooked in favor of complacency, at least to a point.
Considering how Americans view other Americans (I hear "stupid" thrown around a lot), I strongly doubt that a decentralized authority would ever gain enough trust in the US to take hold today without a strong historical precedent.
For what it's worth, cash is still centralized. It's made "legitimate" by the power of the central government, and is managed & controlled by that authority. Given, it is somewhat "decentralized" because the value of fiat money comes from the people's agreement that the currency has value. On the other hand, the US dollar's global hegemony exists in large part because of global US Military presence, which is absolutely a "central authority".
> The Experian breach has shown that breaches of trust are easily overlooked in favor of complacency, at least to a point.
I disagree that it matters for trust in CC's. It may have damaged experians reputation, but people still trust amex/MasterCard/visa and their banks, despite Experian being useless. The fact that Experian is required to access those systems is unfortunate, but most people don't deal with Experian directly.
I think people's day-to-day trust in banks is well placed, for what it's worth. I banked with a large bank that fell in 2008, and had less than 10,000 in my bank. My money wasn't affected, I just had to find a new provider.
I've had multiple incidents of fraudulent transactions on debit and credit cards over the last 15 years, and in _every_ instancr, my card provider has sided with me and refunded me the money immediately (even in the one case I was actually wrong and it was a billing mistake). Those amounts we're almost always in the few hundreds.
Considering that the data breach was actually at a completely different company than the one this thread named leads me to believe that the reputation damage is not as significant as you suggest.
It's unfair to say we still use credit because we are complacent. If you stop caring about building a credit score, you will end up paying more money in things like mortgages or car loans. There is a financial incentive to use credit cards (if you don't miss payments) despite the breach of trust.
I didn't say it's just complacency that keeps the credit system going. Low friction purchasing (complacency) absolutely plays a strong role. Trust is important, too (but is less strong than complacency) because the system wouldn't be used at all without it, and, to your point, fear absolutely plays a role as well.
Considering how Americans view other Americans (I hear "stupid" thrown around a lot), I strongly doubt that a decentralized authority would ever gain enough trust in the US to take hold today without a strong historical precedent.
For what it's worth, cash is still centralized. It's made "legitimate" by the power of the central government, and is managed & controlled by that authority. Given, it is somewhat "decentralized" because the value of fiat money comes from the people's agreement that the currency has value. On the other hand, the US dollar's global hegemony exists in large part because of global US Military presence, which is absolutely a "central authority".