How are Cryptocurrencies Distributed?

Cryptocurrencies are distributed because, instead of living in centralized “server farms” as they often do at Microsoft or Facebook, they are hosted across thousands of individual computers located all over the globe.

These computers are called “nodes”, and they each contain an identical copy of the account balances and transaction history of the cryptocurrency’s database.

This distribution is very important because it means that: 1) it’s almost impossible for a third party to turn them off and 2) they are extremely resilient to hardware failures.