This depends what you mean "works", if it's meant on the technical conceptual level that yes, of course, I think no one would disagree. If it's taken to mean had widespread and growing usage at the social level, then I think that's hard to argue.
How do we know who is behind a hash? Because there is a server (aka. a "centralized authority") that has that information.
So how exactly is that different from using my google account to login to some webservice?
Yes, and what maps that to your physical identity? How is that any different from showing someone a public key you just generated with GPG?
For what it’s worth, I recently read Moxie Marlinspike’s essay on web3, and I think he crystallised one of the most interesting insights I’ve ever heard on that topic:
> We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust.
I think he’s correct, and the cryptocurrency of the future – the one which actually takes off as a medium of exchange – will do exactly what we’re arguing about here. It will use purely cryptography as its mechanism, instead of large groups of servers acting as the gatekeeper. You’ll be able to send money to someone with purely a public key, no servers required, just you and them as peer-to-peer. And, as a corollary, you’ll be able to prove your balance with only a key and the encrypted data of your past transactions. I’ve barely stopped thinking about my envisioned implementation for the past couple of weeks.
that's a very very liberal equivalence to make. decentralized authority in practice is just a collection of servers in aggregate that come to consensus according to a certain protocol.