Distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a cyber stack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.
Bitcoin is a currency, bitcoin is a network, bitcoin is a technology and you can't separate these things. A consensus network that bases its value on the currency does not work without the currency.
The thing I think is often misunderstood about Ripple is people say, 'Oh, Ripple is a centralized platform.' To me, this is a legacy perspective. Ripple's technology, IRP, is open source; XRP Ledger is open source.
With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.
I read a lot of history, and I know that once upon a time, a coin was worth $5 if it had $5 worth of gold in it. Now we have paper that is just backed by fiat... Maybe in the new world, something gets backed by consensus.
The Hyperledger Project is gaining traction on a daily basis, displaying how vital this effort is in advancing distributed ledger technology. Uniting the industry to drive this initiative forward is paramount to the success of distributed ledger technology.
The interesting thing about blockchain is that it has made it possible for humanity to reach a consensus about a piece of data without having any authority to dictate it.
In order to have a decentralised database, you need to have security. In order to have security, you need to - you need to have incentives.
I call the blockchain 'the Internet of value' and 'the Internet of trust.' Because everything becomes trustless. It's a big distributed ledger. Think of it like an Excel file that's being maintained and updated and managed by millions of computers around the world.
t0 is blockchain-agnostic so, ultimately, we can use anybody's blockchain.
On the blockchain, you have a public ledger, which is the form of ownership. That means you are not doing net settlement - just netting everything down, which means that everything has been turned into fungible numbers.
The virtues of the blockchain is that it would be that it's peer-to-peer settlement - no centralized settlement, no manipulation... And most importantly, there's nothing to capture. It's consensus based. It's stateless.
We all want a non-fragmented solution, but the utopian version of a single blockchain to rule them all is undesirable and impractical.
