Decentralized decision making doesn&#x27;t mean that decisions occur in some sort of abstract, Platonic &quot;decentralized space&quot; in which ideas spring into being from the ether and just sort of magically percolate into people&#x27;s mind. It means there is no central authority with the capacity to use one or another variety of force to enforce their decisions. If a dozen people with no enforceable authority over each other look at a problem, discuss amongst themselves (even if there is an informal, unenforced hierarchy), come to similar conclusions, and agree to take coordinated action with no enforcement, it&#x27;s still a decentralized decision.<p>There was no central authority here. Not even BTC Guild, because nobody had the power to force them to do what they did. They did it for their own reasons.<p>This is not a demonstration of how centralization saved the day; this is a demonstration that the decentralized BitCoin network still responded rapidly and solved a major problem, without having to fall back to some sort of centralization.<p>Decentralized networks still develop structure, usually with some sort of power law appearing. They just don&#x27;t form one single central node that defines the very network, upon which the network lives or dies, and the dominant nodes can and often do shift and flow over time. BitCoin has been repeatedly resilient against even very large nodes in their graph dying.<p>(And I say this as a repeated and continuing BitCoin skeptic, not a cheerleader. This sort of decentralized rapid response isn&#x27;t even particularly unusual; the Internet itself faces this sort of crisis fairly routinely and solves the problems without a single centralized authority dictating solutions to everybody else. &quot;Rough consensus and running code&quot; is another similarly-decentralized credo that has built a lot of things.)