🔸Decentralized

Decentralization is the process of distributing and dispersing the power of a central authority. Most existing financial and governmental systems today are centralized, meaning that there is a single highest authority responsible for managing them, such as a central bank or a state apparatus. There are several crucial drawbacks to this approach, stemming from the fact that any central authority also plays the role of a single point of failure in the system: any malfunction at the top of the hierarchy, whether unintentional or deliberate, inevitably has a negative effect on the entire system.

Bitcoin was designed as a decentralized alternative to government money and therefore has no single point of failure, making it more resilient, efficient, and democratic. Its underlying technology, the Blockchain, is what enables this decentralization, as it offers each user an opportunity to become one of the network's many payment processors. Since the emergence of Bitcoin, many other cryptocurrencies or altcoins have appeared, and more often than not, they too use the Blockchain to achieve some degree of decentralization.