Absolutely !  "decentralisation" is about politics and decision power ; "distributed" is about the practical organisation of having geographically/topologically spread processing/storage locations.

Amazon's data centres are distributed ; but they are entirely centralized under Amazon's CEO's decision power.

You could, on the other hand, have a lot of mining of a crypto done in the same data centre, but under the decision power of many different people, independent of one another in their decisions: that would be a decentralized, but non-distributed, system.


I think that bitcoin's idea was an extremely bright attempt, but simply "didn't cut it".  There were very good ideas in bitcoin, but some fundamental issues, pointed out from the start, were not addressed.

The very idea that every user would need a copy of the list of all transactions everywhere, ever done, world wide, is not thinkable for quite some while, technologically speaking.  As such, a compromise needs to be found, where only *some* users keep this copy, and others (most) are at their mercy.  The other idea, that a kind of rewarded lottery is going to organize a competition to who will be the next one that at the same time can collect a reward, and decide upon the to-be-generalized consensus on past transactions, and in doing so is also going to cryptographically secure the list, was automatically going to lead, through economies of scale, to a small oligarchy of miners, to be compared to the board of governors of the central bank.
Finally, the "sound money doctrine", and the consequences of a lot of coin printing in the beginning when it was cheap, with reduced printing of coins when it becomes more expensive, is fuelling a mega-deflationary spiral better known under the name of "HODLING", which will give the mother of all seigniorage to some early adopters possessing significant fractions of the total stash.  Finally, bitcoin's transparent transaction scheme is a privacy's worst night mare.

So in the end, bitcoin is naturally heading to the entire opposite of its announced purpose: it will be a totally centralized financial entity, more tightly controlled than any central bank, by an obscure oligarchy of people without any kind of political mandate or democratic control ; its deflationary spiral will make it essentially useless as a currency an a day-to-day usage, but will be a boon for financial speculators ; it will have created, through immense seigniorage, a small and obscure financial elite of doubtful intend of a kind that ridicules even the Bill Gates' type of fortune, and it will be a tool for total control on the slightest of your financial activities through the analysis of a transparent block chain and a full control of everything you ever do.

Whether this was on purpose or because of a bright but not good enough design, I leave in the middle.