Ripple's Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, is of the opinion that Ripple's XRP token is more decentralized than Bitcoin and Ethereum. Schwartz has been very vocal on Twitter since he took over the role of CTO.
His activity on Twitter led Ripple Chief Market Strategist, Chief Market Strategist, to declare that Schwartz deserves the title of Chief Tweeter. David Schwartz had previously published a post on the Ripple website that talked about the decentralization of the XRP register.
The most decentralized Ripple ledger of Bitcoin and Ethereum
According to the blog post, Schwartz stated that:
Bitcoin and Ethereum are currently seen as the gold standard for decentralization …
Since these blockchains are considered decentralized, so by design, the XRP Ledger is also – if not more – decentralized of both Bitcoin and Ethereum.
proof of the work used by Bitcoin and Ethereum was a good starting point for decentralized systems. Provides miners with incentives to validate transactions.
However, proof of a blockchain working over time can become highly centralized as in the case of Bitmain which controls a large chunk of Bitcoin hashrate.
He added that the Ripple register operates differently to that. He stated that:
XRP Ledger uses a consent protocol that is based on the majority of validators to record and verify transactions without encouraging anyone (this is one of the main reasons why I started working on XRP Ledger for more than six Years ago). Validators are different from miners because they are not paid when ordering and validating transactions.
To validate his argument, he stated that:
Put simply, the XRP is based on an intrinsically decentralized and democratic consensus mechanism – that no party can control.
High transaction costs make cryptos less interesting
Miners always want to increase transaction costs to make more profits. Schwartz stressed that this desire to increase the cost of each transaction makes cryptocurrencies less attractive for real-world use cases such as payments.
He added that XRP does not work this way, stating that:
The XRP Ledger encourages the opposite behavior. Those who use XRP and XRP Ledger are able to make progress without extracting resources, saving significant time and computing power. Furthermore, an integrated system, called tax escalation, is part of its consent protocol and helps to regulate taxes in general. This means lower costs and faster transaction times for XRP than other digital assets – the attributes that make it the most useful resource for regulation.
Schwartz also talked about the centralization of Bitcoin. Four mining groups control 58% of the Bitcoin network while only three groups control 57% of the Ethereum network. This is a huge problem according to him.
He also pointed out that China accounts for 80% of Bitcoin's mining activities at the moment. All these combined factors put the BTC and the ETH at risk of manipulation and can be easily interrupted by a government.
Ripple, however, is immune to this. He stated that 80% of all validators on the XRP register must be on the entire network for a period of more than two weeks so they can support a change before it is approved.
XRP has a total of 150 validators, with Ripple running only 10 of them, a figure too low to be able to make changes to the network.
By making all these points, Schwartz showed that the Ripple register is more decentralized than the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks. With time, the world of cryptocurrencies may realize that Ripple is one of the fastest and most reliable cryptocurrencies in the world.
Weiss evaluations revealed that XRP is the best cryptocurrency to use when transferring funds through exchanges.