Are we decentralized yet?

So we are not decentralized. Git was a good attempt, but it kind of got centralized around GitHub, GitLab, and other variants. BitTorrent was decentralized, except tracker sites were the natural centralization points. Bitcoin was also decentralized, but still had Coinbase and other sites. Even SMTP is de facto centralized due to the spam problem.

Anyone can construct a service like Coinbase, and in fact there are numerous such sites available; at this point, you can even use PayPal! You don't even have to continue using the same one you started with: you can buy Bitcoin with PayPal and then sell it with Coinbase. It seems like a very strange definition of centralized to say that this causes any kind of centralization on Bitcoin...

The link back to the real world is money in your bank account. While Coinbase is not the only market player who can provide that (put money in your bank in exchange for bitcoin), it's the biggest, and so there is (to a degree) de facto centralization. More so given that if Coinbase fell (due to government seizure or similar), it's likely sibling services would fall as well.

Ofc, your bitcoin would still be "safe" and still be "yours" on the chain assuming you owned your wallets directly, but those guarantees would now lack meaning or real world consequences. At least until another link to the real world could be established.

But, Coinbase is not, actually, the biggest... not by far? Binance is like, 20x larger. And it isn't even as if you need to get dollars for your Bitcoin, in case the United States government decides to go aggro, so you can find someone in another country to convert you out through another currency. If this is our definition of centralized, then it is difficult to believe that anything is decentralized. There are enough numerous legitimate reasons to be angry at Bitcoin -- hell: even numerous legitimate reasons to say it is centralized -- that we shouldn't start making some up.