Distributed Network

A distributed network is one whose work and data are spread across many computers in different places, so no single machine holds the only copy or makes every decision. Blockchains are distributed networks in which each node stores the ledger, validates incoming blocks and relays them onward to its peers. Distributed is not the same as decentralised: a company can run a thousand servers around the world and still control every one of them. What matters is whether the participants are independent and free to join. The practical benefit is resilience — nodes can go offline, be seized or be censored while the network keeps producing blocks — and the practical cost is that every participant repeats the same verification work, which limits throughput compared with a single database.