David Schwartz, Ripple’s CTO, just released a post titled: “Beyond Proof of Work (PoW): The XRPL Consensus Solution.” Basically, in which you describe the reasons why the Ripple Ledger Consensus (XRPL) is more trustworthy than PoW.
The Ripple Ledger Consensus (XRPL)
As Satoshi Nakamoto pointed out, a consensus is used to solve the problem of double spending. In this way, referring to the XRPL, it is a probabilistic solution to the problem of the Byzantine Generals. Which overlooks the complexity of the traditional Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) solution.
Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT)
We must understand that Byzantine Fault Tolerance, or BFT for its acronym in English, is one of the most important concepts of Blockchain technology.
It definitely stems from the Problem of the Byzantine Generals. In other words, the actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid a failure of the system. As a consequence, the creation of these strategies are precisely those that grant Tolerance to Byzantine Faults.
These faults can be:
- Consensus failures
- Validation
- Data verification failures
- In the response protocol, in front of network situations
Consensus algorithms
It should be noted that other consensus algorithms continue to innovate. For example, to provide better decentralization at lower cost and lower risk.
Overall, development continues on the XRPL consensus algorithm to improve resilience. In this sense, the recently introduced “Negative UNL” feature is set to dramatically improve XRPL’s capability, thus tolerating validator outages while still making reliable progress.
For its part, Ripple has found that XRP allows its users to obtain liquidity quickly and cheaply. While offering greater scalability than any other cryptocurrency.
In any case, David schwartz added:
“The XRP Ledger (XRPL) has a different design. The consensus validation system that XRPL uses follows an anti-robustness principle that increases reliability ”.
Furthermore, he added: “This provides the system with a built-in security mechanism. In reality, when safe progress is clearly not possible, XRPL does not advance”.
In fact, Ripple will conduct extensive public testing of the Negative UNL feature on XRPL Devnet over the next several months.
What do we know about Ripple Ledger (XRPL)?
Unquestionably based on Fugger’s work and inspired by the creation of Bitcoin, Ripple implemented the Ripple Consensus Ledger (RCL) in 2012. Along with its native cryptocurrency XRP. The RCL was later renamed to XRP Ledger (XRPL).
Actually, the XRPL works as a distributed economic system, which not only stores all the accounting information of the participants of the network, but also provides Exchange services through multiple currency pairs. Also, it allows financial transactions in real time.
Very importantly, these transactions are secured and verified by the network participants. Through a consensus mechanism.
However, unlike Bitcoin, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) does not rely on a Proof of Work consensus algorithm and therefore does not rely on a mining process to verify transactions. Instead, the XRPL reaches consensus by using its own custom consensus algorithm.
In closing, Ripple recommends that its clients use a list of identified and trusted participants to validate their transactions.
I say goodbye leaving you this phrase from Ernest Hemingway: “The best way to know if you can trust someone is by trusting”.
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