New Paper: Ripple Network Doesn’t Meet Criteria To Reach Consensus
A brand-new paper which analyzes the Ripple network concluded that the network does not reach true consensus, as its protocol “may violate safety and liveness,” and doesn’t follow the established models and algorithms for a Byzantine agreement. Report Claims XRP’s Network Is Vulnerable to Malicious Actors According to Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Christian Cachin, and Jovana Micic, researchers from the University of Bern, the Ripple consensus protocol introduces the idea of “subjective validators”, such that every node declares “some trusted....
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Decentralized systems like digital currencies rely on consensus. This enables the network to agree that certain events - transactions, in the case of bitcoin - have taken place. Miners are certainly needed to generate new bitcoins. Yet, their role is far more critical in confirming that bitcoins were actually sent from one place to another, thus maintaining an agreed-upon 'truth' in the network. This keeps the block chain reliable and, arguably, underpins its very existence. However, maintaining consensus in a decentralized network isn't simple. The risk of bad actors disrupting....
Update: Stellar's Jed McCaleb has issued a statement on the issue. While he does not deny that the code has been changed since its fork from Ripple, he does maintain that the Ripple protocol could be at risk. The "TL;DR" version he posted can be found at the bottom of this article, along with the full version here. The remainder of the article, saving for the quote at the end, is in its original form. A failure in its consensus system has caused a hard fork of the Stellar network, forcing its creators to switch to a centralized system while it awaits an upgrade. In the meantime, Stellar....
A recent unintended ledger fork in the Stellar network led to a temporary disruption of its transaction system and a broader debate about the integrity of the Ripple consensus protocol. The debate began on 5th December, when Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) executive director Joyce Kim published a blog post outlining a fork in the Stellar network that the company attributed to problems within the Ripple consensus protocol. Both Ripple Labs and Stellar use the open-source protocol to provide competing transaction networks that allow fiat money to be sent over the blockchain. The....
The Stellar Foundation has released details about the new consensus protocol it hopes to deploy on the Stellar network as early as this summer. Founded on a concept called federated Byzantine agreement, the Stellar Consensus Protocol is intended to replace Stellar's existing consensus protocol, itself is based on the system used by competitor Ripple Labs. The Stellar team said in December that it was working to replace its existing protocol following network issues last September. The Stellar Foundation, the organization that oversees the development of the Stellar network, published the....
A colleague commented to me recently: if you're ever explaining Bitcoin to someone and they're getting it, start talking about Ripple, just to confuse them again. Of course, this was in jest. But, there can be some confusion about Ripple and how it operates. Ripple, just like Bitcoin, is an open-source consensus network and ledger. It achieves consensus every few seconds, making it much faster than Bitcoin. The network creates lines of trust to trade assets between people who are comfortable with each other's default risk. XRP is the native currency of the network and the only native....