I think what is often lost in this debate is that the are levels of decentralisation. Federated networks, committee structures, even the current miner / node structure all have different levels of power concentrated in different amounts. However, in all cases the power is _less_ centralised than in most current applications and for some people that is enough.

The other thing to note is that decentralisation isn't just about ideology. If we forget finance and focus on data, a blockchain solution may in the future provide the ability for open federated data that is provably correct and can operated on transactionally.

Think flight availability: right now the majority of flight ticketing is controlled by Amadeus. A highly centralised, controlled and opaque service. Assuming _many_ technical problems were solved, a blockchain flight ticketing service could allow anyone to run a local node with real time availability that was guaranteed to be correct.

Even if this was run be a federation of providers, it would be a better solution than the current one.