While speaking at the Stifel Cross Sector Insight Conference 2018 in Boston, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple expressed his concerns that “Bitcoin is really controlled by China,” as reported by TheStreet.com on 12th June.
Though Garlinghouse feels that the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and Ripple “will not disrupt banks.” However, this does not mean a dead end for the technologies implementation as he also said that “it will play an important role in the way our system works.” “it’s a short-sighted view,” he further added.
Apart from this, Garlinghouse also discussed and expressed his views about several topics from the cryptoverse and the blockchain technology during a recent interview with Stifel Tech analyst Lee Simpson. He believes that Chinese miners hold the majority holding of Bitcoin, and that doesn’t deserve enough spotlight.
“I’ll tell you another story that is underreported, but worth paying attention to. Bitcoin is really controlled by China. There are four miners in China that control over 50 percent of Bitcoin. How do we know that China won’t intervene? How many countries want to use a Chinese-controlled currency? It’s just not going to happen,” he added.
Garlinghouse also believes that Ripple is better than its competitors. He pointed out that while the Ripple platform takes just four seconds to settle a transaction, “Bitcoin today takes 45 minutes to settle a transaction.” Given the efficiency in settlements, he further noted that Ripple is “the best digital asset for settlement.”
However, a drawback for decentralisation enthusiasts might be the report that the research team of Bitmex released some time back. Their findings suggest that the structure of Ripple’s consensus protocol is responsible for making their currency relatively more centralised.
This Bitmex report is not just based on theoretical research, as the team conducted a “test” to gauge the Ripple technology. For doing so, they operated as a node by downloading five public keys. All these keys were found to be assigned to Ripple.com. This inspired their finding of Ripple being more centralised, as the report stated-
“since the keys were all downloaded from the Ripple.com server, Ripple is essentially in complete control of moving the ledger forward, so one could say that the system is centralised,”
