Is XRP Ledger Truly Centralized? An In-Depth Decentralization Analysis

XRP is a centralized scam. Or at least that's what a lot of people outside the XRP community say about XRP. But guys,

what does this even mean and why do they say it? Well, in this video, I want to break down how the XRP ledger works and

take a look at if there's any truth to these points. One of the most important things about blockchain technology is

the decentralization. And if XRP Ledger was centralized, that could potentially be a huge issue for XRP. So, as someone

who's extremely interested in the XRP ledger, I want to take a honest look. I is the XRP ledger centralized, and is

this something we have to worry about, or is this just an uneducated opinion lofted by people who don't understand

cryptocurrencies themselves? In this video, we're going to break that down. So, make sure to stick around for this

whole thing. Like always, your support means so much to this channel. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to like

these videos and subscribe to the channel. These two simple things really do help out help me out so much. Also,

if you guys ever need a good place to buy some XRP, make sure to check out my favorite strange uphold down in the

description of this video. With that said, let's jump right into it. I hope you guys enjoy the content. So, I jump

right into this video and jump into the accusation that XRP is centralized and a scam. And guys, this was actually

recently put out there by this guy Justin. Now, I actually think I'm going to debate Justin on this, which is

pretty funny, but let's just break down his post and get some initial points out there. He said, "XRP is extremely

centralized, permissioned, low validator account, no stakeholder governance, and zero economic security. It is

centralized in every single way you can imagine. It is criminal that they claim to be more decentralized than Bitcoin

and ETH. XRP is an investment fraud/cam." So, this is quite the accusation put out

here by our boy Justin. And Justin is someone who's been in crypto for a very long time. So let's take a look at some

of these claims and see if anything he is saying actually holds any weight. The first thing we need to jump into though

is what is the purpose of decentralization. Right? What is the purpose of actually making a

cryptocurrency network decentralized? Now this might seem like a silly thing to ask, but it's actually extremely

important, right? What is the purpose? The real purpose of decentralization is that no single party can make unilateral

controls over a network. The other point of decentralization robustness. Right? If you have a validator set that's

distributed and decentralized, if something happens to a single validator, the network itself isn't compromised.

Historically, these are the two biggest reasons when why decentralization is so important. one single party can't change

the rules and two you have a very robust network. Now if we take a look at the XRP ledger, the XRP ledger was up and

running before Ethereum. And since the XRP ledger was created, there has never been a security incident on the XRP

ledger. So this right here should disprove one of the most major accusations being thrown at XRP. If XRP

is so centralized, if it's such a bad network, why does it have one of the best track records in all of crypto in

terms of robustness? Clearly, there's nothing to worry about on that standpoint. Because if XRP was some

fragile centralized network, wouldn't we have seen some kind of security flaw from that? I mean, it's one of the

largest blockchains out there. There's a ton of value that could be extracted by a potential scammer, but it doesn't seem

like anyone's attacking these vulnerabilities on the XRP ledger network. and for a centralized network,

right? That should be fairly easy to do. So, when you take a look at the first key reason on why networks are

decentralized in the first place, it doesn't really seem like the centralization, if there is any, and

we'll take a closer look at that, of the XRP ledger is really playing a part in its security. Now, what's the other

thing? The other thing is unilateral control over the network. So, this is something that's extremely important to

understand, right? Maybe the network just so happened to be robust. But can any single party make a unilateral

change over the network whenever they want? Once again, the story to that is absolutely not. A lot of people will

point to Ripple and say Ripple has full control over the XRP ledger. But guess what? There's been a ton of things

Ripple didn't want that have gotten pushed to the XRP ledger. Recently, something I didn't agree with that got

pushed to the XRP ledger was lowering the wallet reserves from 10 XRP to 1 XRP. In my in my opinion, that was a bad

idea. In Ripple's opinion, it was also a bad idea. But guess what? It happened anyway. And the reason it happened was

is I don't control the XRP ledger, and neither does Ripple. A lot of developers in the community thought it would be a

lot easier to build scalable applications for the XRP ledger if the wallet reserve was a single XRP rather

than 10. And it didn't matter what Ripple thought. It didn't matter what I thought. And in fact, this was a serious

security discussion in terms of whether or not this could potentially break the XRP ledger. So Ripple had every

incentive in the world for this not to happen. But guess what? It happened anyway because it's a decentralized

technology. There's no central counterparty that has control over the network. Now, these are two very

important things to understand because if these two things weren't true, there would be easy ways to disprove it. If

the XRP ledger was constantly going down and Ripple was forced to restart the network, kind of like what happens with

Salana constantly, that would be a huge centralization point. It's like, oh well, this is kind of weird that

Ripple's the one who just magically restarts the network every single time and the network keeps going down, right?

Like that's a point of centralization. But that hasn't happened on the XRP ledger. Additionally, what hasn't

happened on the XRP ledger is Ripple able to unilaterally control decisions that are made. In fact, if you actually

look at how the XRP ledger is architected, most of the decisions that ultimately end up getting pushed through

on the XRP ledger are made by 34 different separate validators. Now, Ripple only owns a single one, giving

them a very minute amount of voting power on what gets pushed in. Ultimately, there's a lot of other

parties in the mix that have to make a decision on whether or not any change happens to the XRP ledger. Once again,

proving decentralization. Now, it's really important to understand. One of the things that our

friend over here, Justin, claimed was that it has low validator count, right? And this is someone who is a big Salana

Maxi, which I think is pretty funny. He's big into Salana. He has all these insults for XRP, but not for Salana.

We'll take that for a grain of salt. But he says low validator count. Now, what's funny about his understanding of the XRP

ledger is it really isn't a very good understanding of how the XRP ledger works because Salana has right now

around 600 validators. The XRP ledger actually has close to a,000 nodes and 187 validators. There's different

components of the XRP ledger that have different functions in maintaining its security. It's not necessarily one for

one across all networks. We talked about the 34 UNL voters who make a lot of the critical decisions on the XRP ledger,

but that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't other important aspects like nodes and validators in creating

economic security over the network itself. There's a lot of different components to these things. And just

trying to compare two networks based off attributes that don't necessarily mean the same thing in one network or the

other doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In fact, I could give you a really good example of that if you're just comparing

two different websites, right? You could take a look at Google and you can take a look at Amazon. And comparing key

metrics across the two probably wouldn't make a lot of sense, right? If I was judging Amazon for the amount of total

users on the platform, but wasn't counting a certain subset of users based off of a specific decision that they

made on the platform. that would massively detract from Amazon's user numbers that Google might be accounting

for. That's how a lot of people try to compare these different blockchains. But the metrics are completely different

across based off of what specific company's metrics are valuable and important. Google might focus a lot more

on how many users are there because that might be really important to ultimately their advertising business, but for

Amazon, it might be users who actually are going in to purchase a specific product because they don't necessarily

care if people are just showing up. They need to make sure those people are actually going through with an

e-commerce transaction. So, so important. Different metrics for different blockchains. But just trying

to say the word validator and saying Salana has this and XRP ledger has this. It's like well the XRP ledger has all

these different people running nodes. Are you just going to completely discount all the different nodes? That's

not represented on the Salana side. So you can't just magically draw up a comparison. Now it gets to a bigger

point. What is the security architecture of the XRP ledger in terms of decentralization in comparison to

Bitcoin and something like Ethereum? And guys, in my opinion, this is one of the most misunderstood things in all of

crypto, and I want to break it down. This is probably the most important part of this video. Everyone knows that the

Bitcoin network is secured by mining. And a lot of people know that the Ethereum network is secured by proof of

stake. Now, what's so interesting about both these models is everyone praises the decentralization of Bitcoin.

Everyone praises the decentralization of Ethereum, but somehow comes at the XRP ledger and says it's not decentralized.

Really, what I want to explain is that's not necessarily the truth. It's just that people don't really understand

these things. Bitcoin and Ethereum, their decentralization comes from the amount of people

interacting with the network. But the problem is is power for whose interaction matters the most on these

two networks comes down to money. If I had $10 trillion right now, I could become the bit the biggest Bitcoin miner

in the world and completely take over the network, right? I could get the most hash power. I could buy out all the

biggest competitors in the United States and I could be the most powerful, influential person on the Bitcoin

network purely by having the most money. I could do the same thing for Ethereum. I could buy a whole bunch of Ethereum,

put it onto the network, stake it, and become the most influential person in the Ethereum network. At the end of the

day, Bitcoin and Ethereum, the value of the protocol is given to the people with the most money. The more money you have,

the more influence you have over the network. Now, you might be thinking, "Wow, that doesn't seem that

decentralized. So, why does everyone say it's decentralized?" It's really because a lot of people partake because they get

a little bit of rewards for doing so. I can go set up a Bitcoin miner and even though even if I have absolutely zero

influence over the network, maybe once in a while I get a free Bitcoin. So, for me, just for fun, I might have a Bitcoin

miner set up, and that gets a lot of people participating, even if only a couple people with all the money are

making all the most important decisions, and the long tale of very unimportant people are just there to farm some

rewards. The same thing is true for Ethereum. I could go stake all my Ethereum right now, given I only have a

couple dollars of Ethereum, but I could get rewards for doing so, and I could be contributing to the decentralized nature

of the network. But if I have no influence for actually doing that and the Ethereum I'm putting up makes

absolutely no difference in comparison to Black Rockck putting up millions of Ethereum, right? It's not going to make

a huge difference for me and the decentralization of the network. Yes, a lot of people are partaking, but the

order of power in the people partaking is completely concentrated in the richest people. And the people who don't

have a lot of money have absolutely no influence. So, take a look at this, right? If you took a look at the two

most influential people on the Bitcoin network, they make up close to 52% of the hash power. Compare that to Ripple

having one UNL on the 34 validator list. Ripple has far less control than these two Bitcoin miners. Now, I will say more

people participate in Bitcoin's decentralization. More people participate in Ethereum's

decentralization, but more doesn't necessarily mean better if the most important people and the

richest people are still calling the shots no matter what. So it's more of just a facade than anything else. You

can say a billion people are part participating in Bitcoin's decentralization. But if those a billion

people are still a fraction of the power of two people, then it makes absolutely no difference. On the XRP ledger, every

person in the UNL has equal power. So, if I was added to the UNL because the network participants thought that I was

someone who should be added to the UNL, then I would have the same amount of power as Ripple. It doesn't matter that

Ripple has billions of dollars. The network looks as me as a trusted party and believes that I should be treated

equally in comparison to everyone else in the network who has that decision-making capability. That right

there is true decentralization. The network itself is distributing power equally among the participants rather

than the richest participants getting the most access over the network. And this should be just a complete

destruction of this decentralization argument. The idea that just because Bitcoin has a whole bunch of people who

have absolutely no say in the network participating should not artificially make it more decentralized something

than the XRP ledger. And in fact, I think there's very valid arguments out there that in fact the XRP ledger is

more decentralized because of this fundamental flaw in Bitcoin and Ethereum where the richest people get the most

power. Guys, this is just a very simple breakdown of why a lot of these arguments completely fall flat on their

face. Not only is there any not not only is there nothing we can point to that shows a systemic problem coming from

XRP's so-called centralization issue but on top of that when we actually dig into how decentralization is created among

these networks there are a lot of benefits to the way the XRP ledger does it that Bitcoin and Ethereum fall flat

on their face on. I hope this highlights some of these things and makes it so the next time you read a comment like this,

you don't just say, "Oh, well, maybe the XRP ledger is a little less decentralized," and instead say, "Does

this person even know what they're talking about when they put out a post like this?" Thank you so much for

coming. I hope you enjoyed this update and for now, ML out.