Computing in the general sense of the word has been centralized in the early days of IFIP (1960s) with mainframe computers and became distributed in later decades (1980s) with stand-alone personal computers. Then distributed ledger technology was introduced and the arrival of Bitcoin emphasized the intention in addition to distribution to also decentralize the system as much as possible. In this article we focus on the meaning of centralized versus decentralized computing and apply this to the world of digital payments.