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Technical Error

[edit]

The statement "Ripple protocol, which differs from the mining technique used in bitcoin" is incorrect in that Ripple doesn't use mining and was specifically developed to eliminate mining.

Saying that it 'differs' from the Bitcoin mining technique implies that Ripple has a mining technique (which it doesn't).

It might seem like a minor linguistic difference but the practical effect is eliminating the MASSIVE energy and expense incurred by Bitcoin mining.

That goal is referenced in the Wired article used as a reference:

  • before McCaleb left his active role with the company in July 2013.[11]

First, he wanted to do away with Bitcoin mining – the process by which computers on the network verify transactions in exchange for Bitcoins. Because miners are rewarded in proportion to the processing power they add to the network, Bitcoin mining has become a bit of an arms race, with very specialized and powerful computers now doing the bulk of the work.

McCaleb, a 38-year-old surfer and Berkeley dropout from Little Rock, Arkansas, sees this as excessive. By his reckoning, there's $160 million spent annually on mining the Bitcoin network, "which is insane," he says. "And this isn't something that's going to go away. It just gets worse and worse."

If anyone is wondering about how Ripple determines consensus:

Abstractly, the XRP Ledger network is a replicated state machine [9]. The

replicated state is the ledger maintained by each node in the network and state transitions correspond to transactions submitted by clients of the network. Once nodes agree on sets of transactions to apply to the state, a transaction processing protocol specifies deterministic rules for ordering transactions within each set and how to apply transactions to generate the new ledger state.

— Brad Chase, Ethan MacBrough, Analysis of the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07242.pdf


--Netscr1be (talk) 16:28, 30 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]