Review on XRP by Nate Mielnik

Name: XRP
Item: XRP
Rating: 1

February 01, 2018

I really dislike that Ripple is compared side-by-side with things like Bitcoin…

I really dislike that Ripple is compared side-by-side with things like Bitcoin, DASH, and Monero, it is so drastically different than the others that I think it's lame to call it a cryptocurrency like those other projects. I've certainly gained plenty of profit by holding Ripple during it's crazy runs, but once I learned how it works at its core, I'll forever pass on holding any Ripple and hope it never gains enough power to hurt true decentralized efforts.
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Pros

This is a "safe" system for someone who doesn't understand the power of decentralization, or is hesitant about putting faith in something that's not a bank. This is clearly a great improvement over SWIFT or ACH as a may of moving money between banks. The speed of transactions and the meteoric rise of its pumps has certainly attracted a lot of attention. I think this could be a logical first step for places like banks to ease into the decentralized blockchain space without going full tilt into other projects. I could definitely see the appeal of a bank to feel like they've "gotten into cryptos" without really buying into decentralization. The consensus protocol is certainly fast, but it also very problematic and worrisome, at least how it's described in the white paper.

Cons

I've always felt like this project was massively misleading, especially since it's so commonly compared to all the other truly decentralized systems. In my mind, this was NEVER a decentralized blockchain currency, just an improvement upon the existing SWIFT and ACH systems. The ripple token isn't even required when doing transfers since all the nodes in the network are just banks...they can just trust each other and transfer any currency they want and never convert it to ripple. The consensus mechanism (Ripple protocol - Byzantine Fault Tolerant) seems so centralized with some very scary vulnerabilities that I very uncomfortable with it. In the interest of allowing transactions to be fast, it will automatically vote-out nodes that don't respond quickly enough...which means nodes could just DOS another node until it's slow to respond, and thus have it kicked out of the consensus altogether! You can also have another node kicked out because it disagrees with enough of the transactions...this means there are multiple methods of attack for malicious nodes to get good actor nodes removed from the consensus mechanism automatically! Besides the blatant lack of centralization, their consensus mechanism is scary as hell