About
An explainer spoke, not a product
whydecentralize.org explains why institutions, networks, and governments sometimes spread the capacity to decide, record, or refuse — and what they give up when they do. It is a concept desk, not a launch pad. The four files are power, money, technology, and governance.
Where it sits in the wider desk
The live conflict map at armedconflicts.org is the hub of the Situation Monitor citation cluster. That hub is frozen: this repo will not restyle it, rewrite it, or treat it as a canvas. When a concept page touches sanctions, chokepoints, or political violence, we add an inbound link to the hub or to a named briefing there.
Adjacent spokes we cite when the subject calls for them: What is BRICS (groupings and settlement language), US Foreign Policy, Foreign Diplomacy, US Market Updates, Global Market Updates, and Political Violence Map.
Methodology
- Treat decentralization as a spectrum of where authority sits, not as a moral badge or a brand.
- Prefer constitutions, charters, protocol specifications, and central-bank or payment-system documentation over commentary.
- Name the trade-off in the same paragraph as the claim: resilience against capture versus coordination cost, deadlock, or local abuse.
- Label uncertainty in plain type. Never invent user counts, market shares, hash-rate percentages, “adoption” ratios, or polling majorities.
- Do not define the subject as a cryptocurrency. Tokens are one contested implementation, not the concept.
What this site is not
It is not a government website, a political party, a wallet, an exchange, or a live wire. It does not take a brief for or against any coin, protocol, or vendor. Advocacy and fundraising copy belong elsewhere. If you need markets, diplomacy, or conflict geography, use the desks linked above.
This site is light-mode only. Machine-readable companions for agents live at /llm-info, /llms.txt, /ai.txt, and /agents.txt.