n00b question: is BTC infrastructure *really* 100% decentralized?

[conspirosphere.tk]

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

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[tysat]

Yes it is 100% decentralized, there's no one thing you could remove to take down bitcoin.  It would involve taking down a lot of nodes/pools/etc to hurt bitcoin badly.

[deepceleron]

About the only thing centralized is information about Bitcoin. When this forum was down, one quickly recognized the concentration of information here about mining software, pools, tech support, trading, etc.

[Gabi]

Yes, it's 100% decentralized.

Of course that doesn't stop us from having some centralized things like exchanges or mining pools. But they aren't required. You can solo mine, you can exchange bitcoins with anyone you want without using the exchanges and so on.

Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

To the pool server. You can start a pool and then people would connect to you, that's all.

You can solo mine of course. But since the average user would have to wait months to find a block, we all use pools 

[kokjo]

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

miners connect to pools. and pools broadcast, a solved block.

the only centralized parts are exchanges, mining pool, and forums. each can be replaced by some p2p-type of system.
exchanges: person-2-person.
mining pools: p2pool, or solo mining.
forums: well we can always make more of them.

you would have to assassinat all bitcoin users, to make it stop.

[nmat]

Or it could be put off by a great Bitcoin crackdown, a campaign of assassinations or s/t like that?
Where do the miners/pools connect to get their problems to solve?

Sorry for the noobness, but I am too lazy to study the white papers.

It could be harmed if a malicious user controls more than 50% of the computation power. The decentralization exists, but I doubt that it will scale... Anyway, we have more important things to worry about right now. Here is a nice wiki reading: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses