> Basically transforming what bitcoin has become, with few mining pools/operators deciding its fate and whom users anyway have to trust - into witnesses which can be replaced.
This is a poor analogy because colluding Bitcoin miners can never steal funds; they just stamp a chain with proof of work, while the Bitcoin P2P network verifies the stamped blocks, and rejects them if they’re invalid. In the case of Byteball, colluding witnesses can steal funds, which becomes increasingly problematic as the value of the currency increases.
With Ripple, no one can steal money. Just like with bitcoin, all transactions have to be signed by the payer at least. However, instead of POW being what selects the next miner, there's a different consensus algorithm that doesn't waste electricity. And Ripple moves more money than bitcoin per day.
I don’t dispute that. Ripple is centralized, there are dozens of centralized payment systems out there, but that’s not what Bitcoin is competing against. Creating performant, centralized payment systems are a solved problem. The question is what Ripple brings to the table that the other payment systems don’t.
Bitcoin is just as centralized now in practice. There are just a few mining pools that have the most electricity to spend. In Ripple they will eventually expand the number of main nodes way beyond what bitcoin has.
Once a transaction has been made you just need SOMEONE to confirm it for the blockchain. In bitcoin, that's the miner that happened to solve the POW. If they don't take your transaction, the next miner will. In Ripple it's effectively the same thing.
Even with Byteball the witnesses cant steal funds or generate new ones without the other full nodes noticing and rejecting the same way as other bitcoin full nodes can reject if a miner generates a 10000 coinbase reward to itself.
I don’t understand. If nodes do not accept whatever the witnesses say is the true transaction history, why are the witnesses needed in the first place?
I know that it’s not possible for a witness to fake some users signature, and send these funds to themselves, but that’s not the attack we need to worry about. The attack we need to worry about is witnesses colluding to present a false history of transactions, such that the user’s funds (that the miners want) were never sent to that user in the first place, thus remaining the property of the coinbase owner. Since all coins originate as a coinbase, if witnesses go far enough back in time, all coins are theirs.
This is a poor analogy because colluding Bitcoin miners can never steal funds; they just stamp a chain with proof of work, while the Bitcoin P2P network verifies the stamped blocks, and rejects them if they’re invalid. In the case of Byteball, colluding witnesses can steal funds, which becomes increasingly problematic as the value of the currency increases.