The average person defines trust very differently than the average hacker, Hacker News reader, crypto-anarchist, or Ethereum developer.
For the latter group, trust means that mathematically nothing can go wrong. Everything is cryptographically proven, and short of being able to factor large primes, there is no logical way for the protocol to result in an incorrect answer, and no central authority that can abuse its authority.
For the average person, trust means nothing has gone wrong. When you first encounter a stranger, you open up a little bit, trust him with small secrets or small tasks, and see what happens. If she doesn't abuse that trust, you entrust her with progressively more vulnerability. Once someone or something has a long-time record of being in a place where they could have abused your trust but did not, they're considered "trustworthy".
For many people, Uber is still a trusted third party. Ditto Facebook and Google. For most of the media, they're not, because Facebook and Google together fucked over most of the media in a pretty large way. But half of America - and much of the rest of the globe - doesn't trust the media anyway, because the media's story is unrepresentative of their own lived experience. The average person determines who to trust on their own, irrespective of what the math says. For them, the fact that Ethereum has been hacked even though mathematically it can't be hacked is a big strike against it - unless they have another reason to trust it, like having made a whole lot of money speculating in it.
Works pretty well. If you want to minimize trust you can add signing, encryption and hash-chaining to your central database, but I doubt people actually care much about any of that.
I mean, you are still running some client code you have to trust. People who want to take taxi rides aren't going to build their own client to interface with the taxi blockchain. What is the difference if the database is distributed instead of centralized?
For the latter group, trust means that mathematically nothing can go wrong. Everything is cryptographically proven, and short of being able to factor large primes, there is no logical way for the protocol to result in an incorrect answer, and no central authority that can abuse its authority.
For the average person, trust means nothing has gone wrong. When you first encounter a stranger, you open up a little bit, trust him with small secrets or small tasks, and see what happens. If she doesn't abuse that trust, you entrust her with progressively more vulnerability. Once someone or something has a long-time record of being in a place where they could have abused your trust but did not, they're considered "trustworthy".
For many people, Uber is still a trusted third party. Ditto Facebook and Google. For most of the media, they're not, because Facebook and Google together fucked over most of the media in a pretty large way. But half of America - and much of the rest of the globe - doesn't trust the media anyway, because the media's story is unrepresentative of their own lived experience. The average person determines who to trust on their own, irrespective of what the math says. For them, the fact that Ethereum has been hacked even though mathematically it can't be hacked is a big strike against it - unless they have another reason to trust it, like having made a whole lot of money speculating in it.