Читать книгу Cryptocurrency All-in-One For Dummies онлайн

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By 2011, Ripple’s target demographic started paying attention to Bitcoin, which was just becoming popular and was doing a better job as a peer-to-peer payment network than Ripple. Ripple’s architecture started to shift when an early Bitcoin pioneer, Jed McCaleb, joined the Ripple network in May 2011. Others joined the Ripple bandwagon as time went by.

Finally, Ripple’s XRP, a cryptocurrency that also acts as a digital payment network for financial institutions, was released in 2012, according to their website, https://ripple.com/xrp/. Like many other cryptocurrencies, XRP is based on a public chain of cryptographic signatures. That being said, Ripple is very different from traditional cryptos like Bitcoin and even Ethereum.

Here are some of the key differences between these two cryptocurrencies.

 Ownership and decentralization: Bitcoin is not owned by any particular person or entity, and Bitcoin the cryptocurrency is pretty much the same as Bitcoin the open-source platform. That’s why Bitcoin is highly decentralized and open source, and owned by a community that agrees on changes. This setup can make upgrades tough and is why Bitcoin has had a ton of forks (hard and soft; see ssss1 of this minibook) in its history.By contrast, Ripple is a private company called Ripple Labs, with offices all over the world. Ripple’s digital asset (cryptocurrency) is called XRP and is also owned by Ripple Labs. The company constantly looks to please everyone (especially its partners) and come up with consensus, which can allow for faster upgrades. It has an amendment system with which the developers seek consensus before making changes to the network. In most cases, if an amendment receives 80 percent support for two weeks, it comes into effect, and all future ledgers must support it. Basically, Ripple is a democracy that tries to avoid hard forks and nasty splits! You can find out more about Ripple and its most recent updates at https://ripple.com/.