The idea is to create a decentralised network of networks, a bit like the internet.
This is a decentralised form of production in which the underlying programming instructions, or "source code", for a given piece of software are made freely available.
The industry is getting its head around how the idea of a decentralised database of music rights could solve some of its pressing problems.
Bitcoin's supporters have consistently argued that the currency is impossible to fully ban, since it exists as a decentralised network of transactions.
Another idea, much liked by economic reformers in Moscow, is to move over to a decentralised system of small gas boilers, rather than pumping heat from giant plants.
With blockchain, there is no middleman in peer-to-peer exchanges; instead, users rely on a decentralised network of computers that interact through a cryptographic, secure protocol.
In 2001, the Cameroon government initiated a decentralised approach of its national antiretroviral treatment (ART) programme to the district level.
In Nigeria, successive national constitutions (starting in 1979, then in 1989, and most recently in 1999) have all prescribed a decentralised structure of governance.
A virtual version of this now exists.Bitcoin, the world's "first decentralised digital currency", was devised in 2009 by a programmer called Satoshi Nakomoto (thought not to be his, or her, real name).
Al-Qaeda, he said, had "morphed into a decentralised entrepreneurial organisation" of exceptional speed and agility.
