The US has extremely centralized electronic payments, it's just that the central points are Visa and MasterCard. I'm sure there are philosophical points in favor of decentralized systems, and systems not run by governments, but are we really better off giving 1.5-3% of each transaction to Visa or MasterCard?

Obviously, centralized is centralized whether it’s private or public. Both are bad.

However, parallel centralized private systems with strong safeguards are slightly better than a single public system. But only slightly. Public centralized payments create turnkey totalitarianism, which is never a good idea.

What the industry badly needs is antitrust enforcement.