:::It's not really true that only the overlapping nodes get to vote, every node affects its neighbours and therefore its indirect neighbours too. Nodes with a central position in the trust graph would likely have more influence, but in Bitcoin something similar happens: pools / miners with a lot of hashing power have more influence than ones with less hashing power. I don't think we should definitively state that the Ripple system is neither centralised nor decentralised without more precise definitions + supporting citations from reliable sources. We need these in any event.