What is driving this growth in Ripple? I mean Ethereum is more "public" and better known, yet Ripple just flies up.
I think XRP has been significantly undervalued for a long time. But honestly, even I don't understand this. Part of it is a combination of lots of different things happening at the same time.
Part of it is the fact that transactions on XRP's ledger just work better. The transaction volume supported is higher and the confirmation time is much, much faster. With bitcoin's transaction fees being so high, backlog being so large, and governance being perceived to be breaking down, there was room left for a system to work better. But that doesn't explain why XRP rather than Litecoin or Ethereum.
Another factor is probably that the increased value and liquidity opens up more use cases. One obstacle to using XRP for many applications was that the value and liquidity just weren't there. Now they are. Ripple is pursuing a use case as an intermediary currency for international payments because we think that's where we can do best. But now others are more likely to use XRP for other applications. I think there's also an expectation that XRP's reach will increase as more companies realize how much money they left on the table this past two months by not supporting XRP.
Also, I know this is going to be controversial, but it is a fact that XRP's consensus model fosters better governance than bitcoin's PoW model. Bitcoin's PoW model makes miners major stakeholders -- without enough of them, the blockchain is not secure. And their interest can be averse to those of the users/holders of bitcoin. For a long time, it wasn't an issue. Everyone just wanted the system to work, to grow, and for the price of bitcoin to go up. But now, with transaction fees exceeding the block reward, the miners are pursuing their own interests to the detriment of the rest of the community.
Consensus has no miners -- the users are the sole stakeholders. Mining is inherently centralizing because someone will have the best price for power and the best price for ASICs. Consensus is neither inherently centralizing nor decentralizing. That means it won't be decentralized by itself. It will take work to increase decentralization. But at least we don't have the technology's inherent properties working against us. (And I concede, we have a lot more to do on this front. Also, in compensation for this advantage, consensus also has some disadvantages -- primarily a public good problem with validators.)
This doesn't have to be a big deal. The miners need bitcoin to work and right now it's not working very well. Hopefully bitcoin will work through its governance issues. I truly believe that what's good for bitcoin is good for the space and what's bad for bitcoin is bad for space. We shouldn't be fighting each other over the current market share, we should all be pursuing increased market share. ILP will be good for bitcoin and ethereum too.
