But Bitcoin is a software protocol; it is an internal process that can be carried out on any one of billions of computer machines that are distributed worldwide. Bitcoin has no single point of failure, no single indispensable hardware structure anywhere in the world on which it relies. Any computer that runs Bitcoin's software can connect to the network and carry out operations on it. It is in that sense similar to the Internet, in that it is a protocol that allows computers to connect together; it is not the infrastructure which connects them.
