The facts are: since the 80bn XRP wasn't paid for, you're not operating under free market forces at all. You are manipulating the market in order to artificially inflate the liquidity of XRP
I agree that we are using the value of the XRP to create liquidity.
That doesnt sound like decentralisation at all. Decentralisation is free market forces, no manipulation, everything being paid for and not allowing any party to gain artificial bias.
No party gained any artificial bias. The 80 billion XRP that was gifted to Ripple had *zero* value. Anyone else could have done exactly what Ripple did and gotten the same result.
You are creating a central system in your actions, no matter how much talk of decentralisation you want to talk about. Actions count more than words.
I agree that in no way is the distribution of XRP decentralized.
A much more authentic way of reasoning would be to say you have both central and decentral elements built into the XRP concept...and that there was an attempt to have a balance, and in the end, the free market will win and decide the ultimate outcome.
I think that's an entirely fair statement. When I talk about decentralization, I am only talking about the operation and governance of the network, not the distribution of the token. If you're talking about the distribution of the token, that's entirely different. I see many reasons why you would want operation and governance to be decentralized. To be honest, I see absolutely no reason you would want distribution to be decentralized anymore. Experience since 2012 has shown that just doesn't work very well. But the market will eventually decide.
At the time I first stared working on what became the current Ripple, I saw no reason to want an alternative to PoW. I genuinely believed that it would be inherently fair and decentralizing and would foster good governance (if any was needed) by aligning interests. We now know that is not entirely true, though of course PoW continues to work quite well. But it does not ensure decentralization by itself nor does it necessarily foster good governance. Those things still take work, and to some extent you are fighting the technology.
The biggest problem with PoW though is simply that it cannot be scaled. There is not going to be one blockchain to rule them all because too many people, for legitimate reasons, want too many different things from their blockchains. Some people don't want any complexity that has a performance cost -- they just want fast token movement. Some people have use cases that require more complexity (like cross-currency payments). And PoW won't scale because each such system has to find some way to incentivize the PoW needed to keep its chain secure. There is no known way for smaller systems to do that. Distributed agreement protocol do not have this limitation, though they cannot do an initial token distribution to people who waste power.
