Comment by unixplumber

One really nice thing about a distributed version control system is that it lets me as a developer make commits to track my work without having to push them to a central location and pollute the global commit history of the repository. I can modify my commit history (to clean it up and remove all of my failed experiments, for example) before I publish it, so to speak. Or I can completely remove my commits without publishing at all if what I was trying didn't pan out.