decentralized vs distributed payments

People always talk about 'decentralized' money when it's 'distributed'.
What's the difference? A distributed system is shared over many hard
drives. A decentralized system goes one step further. It does not have a
central point of control. In the case of bitcoin the central point of
control is the protocol which says "longest chain wins". That means the
chain with the most electricity is valued and all other chains are
valueless. If you agree on the central tenet (and a few rules) you can
participate.

A pure decentralized system would be much simpler. It would take the
essential essence of money (a ledger + transactions) and have no other
constraints. Each entry in the ledger would point to an entity. Each value
in the ledger would be an amount. That's it. There is no pre ordained
protocol.

Any agent or group can use their ledger for operations of the system. But
that's boring. When it becomes interesting is when ledgers start to
interact and form protocols spontaneously. Fortunately the web facilities
this quite well. A ledger is easy to program, a beginner programmer could
write a ledger in less than 10 minutes. It would look something like:

{
coinbase : 1000
identifer1 : 0
identifer2 : 0
}

Then transactions are just diffs on that. It can run in a browser, on the
web, on a server or even on pen and paper. Once distributed systems like
this emerge and create spontaneous protocols through P2P consensus, we'll
have a truly decentralized money system.