Actually, BTC is one of more centralized ones, both by pools (3 or 4 big ones can do 51% attack), and by country (China alone can attack it)
Agreed! Bitcoin mining is becoming centralized. However, this does not change that Ripple is a centralized platform. It will only stop being centralized if Ripple finds a decentralized consensus process on adding nodes in the Trusted Nodes List.
For the hundredth time, the nodes that take care of the consensus are decentralized and open to anyone !!!
Just have a look at the list of validators here:
https://xrpcharts.ripple.com/#/validatorsOut of the total 117 nodes running on the main net, only 7 are controlled from ripple.com !
(yes I actually counted all the nodes one by one to make sure since CTRL+F was returning a little bigger number)This is just 5% of the network controlled by Ripple!!
5%--- shortened the quote ---The above numbers show us that after 1 year...
- 2300 million XRP have left the escrow and 2299m of them are in circulation right now, the 1m XRP difference are burnt coins.
- From 15% of the coins held by XRP in the end of March 2018, we're now at 13%.
- Considering the XRP held by Ripple and the XRP distributed as "coins in circulation" and the XRP placed in escrow as "coins to be mined", XRP had a good yearly inflation rate of 4.74% (for comparison, BTC had about 4.5% and ETH about 7%).
Ofcourse Ripple stills has the potential to earn 51billion of XRP , but this will take about 50 more years.
Ripple promises that they sell their coins on OTC deals which shouldn't affect the trading price in exchanges, but even if they were to dump 100% of the coins they earn to the market, the impact would still be similar to BTC miners dumping 100% of their coins or Ethereum miners dumping 70% of their mined coins.
However does Ripple let everyone or have a consensus process on who to include in the
Trusted Node List? Also to who or where did they distribute all the XRP sold by Ripple? I reckon to a few
trusted parties by Ripple, correct?
Who holds the XRP in escrow?
Who holds in escrow?
A:
A mathematical formula wich releases 1 billion xrp a month and put the unsold back into escrow.
In btc they call that mining.
Can you explain more how that escrow system works? Can anyone participate in
mining Ripples? I reckon the community should participate in this to help secure the Ripple ledger.
First of all, "Ripple" is the name of the company that created this blockchain and all the business software that uses XRP.
"XRP" is the name of the coin which is used as the backbone in some of their software.
None can "mine" XRP. The escrow/algorithm releases a stable amount only to the Ripple company who sells or gifts it to partner companies and/or for marketing reasons, I don't think we have the exact details of how they use this monthly XRP income but we should be able to tell by watching the blockchain.
However there's no reason to panic with this method, since the coins are
NOT SOLD to public exchanges, they are sold OTC (Over The Counter), for example I might want to sell 1000 BTC, but instead of dumping them on the market and driving the price down we could both agree that I transfer you the BTC and you give me 5.50 million through a private channel. Since the exchange is not going through the public Exchanges, the sale does't affect the coin's price.
This method allows Ripple Labs (the company) to benefit by having a monthly income without pushing the coin's price down. The coins are distributed the same way they'd be distributed if people were mining it,
but instead of paying for hardware and electricity bills, they pay Ripple Labs.