It is very misleading claim that bitcoin users do not need to trust centralized authority, in fact every one uses bitcoin is trusting this centralized protocol originally designed by Satoshi: Every miners, nodes, exchanges, merchants, users, no exception
What is very misleading? The protocol does not rely on any external authority that enforces it and its original creator is no longer around. In fact miners are free to alter the protocol but they have counter-incentive to do that in the form of block reward. To obtain that they have to keep sure that they keep on extending the longest chain.As for non-miners, they are interested that their transactions are safeguarded, and that is again provided by the longest chain.
Earlier attempts at making digital cash relied solely on cryptography, and had to implement a central trusted server, whereas Satoshi introduced
two economic incentives into the system (block subsidy and transaction fees) which made it possible for it operate in a decentralized manner.
Just as the block reward does away with the need of central authority who issues money and detects double spends, the existence of transaction fee market does away with the need of a central authority who dictates the upper block size limit.
The protocol indeed rely on large actors to enforces it. I would glad to see that the protocol itself is self-aware and reject any attempt to modify it, then we have a truly decentralized system without human interference. All the scaling solution will go off-chain, and I thing that will make bitcoin the most trustworthy/incorruptible monetary system on this planet
But currently the protocol is the centralized control point, if you can persuade 12 large actors (5 mining pools, 5 exchanges, 1 web wallet and 1 payment processor) to adopt one specific protocol, then you basically control the majority of this ecosystem, anyone else has neglectable influence
The reason that it gives people hope that a political move might work is because the protocol is highly centralized, if we indeed have a very decentralized system then there will not be such difficulties like we see today. But you can not have freedom in selecting protocol, since that means you just created another alt-coin which will worth a little due to its inflation nature