Decentralized Park - defining Centralized and Decentralized Systems
Is Bitcoin actually mostly centralized? How about national democracies? What about slime molds? We can define centralized systems as being when there are shared rules that all individuals are using to function — be it physical or ideological direction — regardless of who or what generates those rules, or whether they are located in just one place, or distributed. Centralized governance makes systems predictable and fairly rigid. Therefore, a decentralized system is one in which there are no (important) shared rules, and the behavior of the system as a whole is unpredictable, random, and often with emergent outcomes.
For more exploration of systems, governance, physics, and even personality, please check out my blog and podcast, at http://www.turil.org
Thanks to http://mattbierbaum.github.io/moshpit... for creating and sharing the complexity simulator I played with near the end of the video. It's a lot of fun, and I encourage folks to try it out. It's not entirely representative of centralized and decentralized systems, but it offers a nice way to see how different factors affect the predictability of systems, especially if you play around with the noise, flocking strength, and ratios of the more stable, introverted (black) balls vs. the active, extraverted (red) balls.