The new CTO of Ripple and “one of the original architects of the Ripple consensus network” doesn’t believe that there will be a single cryptocurrency that will have pushed all others out of existence in the foreseeable future.
The now CTO and previously chief cryptographer, David Schwartz, during an Ask me anything (AMA) session shared some of his views and insights.
Schwartz believes that in the crypto market the competition isn’t one that will result in an ultimate winner. Each crypto performs its own specific function.
“We expect that this will not be a winner take all outcome but instead a number of digital assets can survive for specific use cases, today, for example, Ethereum provides a ‘programmable money’ function that the XRP Ledger cannot. Adding this capability to the XRP Ledger would have huge costs that reduce XRP’s suitability for payments. You can’t have everything.”
As to the Ripple technology, Schwartz pointed out that one of the weaker points of the XRP ledger technology was the fact, that it cannot offer initial public offerings (IPOs), and the fact that there is a shortage of programmable behavior, keeps Ripple from becoming the only crypto out there. Nevertheless, Schwartz mentioned that Ripple is developing a technology, that would allow separating payment functionality from other operations.
Unlike the CEO of Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, who is known to distrust bitcoin, Schwartz believes “it’s the first example of an exciting new technology and still the market leader, at least by market cap.” He also disclosed that he himself has some BTC. Nevertheless, bitcoin isn’t ideal in the opinion of Schwartz, and despite being a public defender of bitcoin, he is not a fan of its protocol.
“Proof of work is expensive, has no clear response to a majority attack, and has not delivered on its promise of decentralization. It makes miners forced stakeholders, because the system is not secure without them, and miner’s interests can diverge from the interest of other users.”
Going on to further comment bitcoin’s network design, Schwartz “genuinely believes” that Ripple’s ledger technology is a step up from the crypto father currency.