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One way to do it is to think about which parts are centralized vs. distributed vs. replicated: discovery, authentication, processing, storage, files, etc.

Take bitcoin, for example: the ledger is centralized (there is a single monolithic one) but its storage is replicated (there isn't a single central storage location) and the processing is decentralized.

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It doesn't follow that a "single monolithic ledger" means Bitcoin is decentralized. Since all (full) nodes carry a copy of the entire ledger and every participant in the network can propose transaction blocks to the blockchain, there isn't one party that controls writing to the ledger.

Risk of centralization comes from mining pools that control 51% of the hashing power. [1]

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/glossary/51-percent-attack

> It doesn't follow that a "single monolithic ledger" means Bitcoin is decentralized

Oh, I never mentioned that. But the implication of the single, monolithic ledger is that it isn't partition-tolerant, if you don't have access to the ledger, you can't transact.

IIRC, the lightning network kinda addresses that by allowing off-central-ledger transactions.

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