Chris Larsen, the CEO and Founder of Ripple Labs was successful in enraging the Bitcoin community earlier this year by saying that the world doesn’t need another currency as we already have plenty of those. The statement made during one of his presentationss to the California General Assembly obviously referred to Bitcoin as a currency. It looks like he has changed since then, as in a recent interview with Brett King’s on the radio show Breaking Banks he seemed to be talking in favour of Bitcoin over fiat currency.
In the previous instance, it appeared that Chris was more interested in the technology behind Bitcoin than Bitcoin itself. But his comment sounded more like him taking a dig at Bitcoin than being more concerned about Blockchain and distributed ledgers. It is a well-known fact that Blockchain can’t exist without Bitcoin or a similar currency and in order to sustain the growing Blockchain it is necessary to incentivise the miners, which seemed to have escaped his mind at that time.
However, that was a thing of the past, for Chris seemed to have a more positive outlook about Bitcoin during the interview on Breaking Banks. When faced with a question about the Bitcoin vs Blockchain debate, Chris gracefully responded by saying that Bitcoin by itself and Blockchain are different things and like any other digital asset Bitcoin is interesting too. He also agreed that Bitcoin has presented many powerful use cases which can’t be ignored, making it a grand success. He also mentioned that his platform, Ripple being a currency agnostic platform doesn’t differentiate between Bitcoin and other currencies.
Chris, during the interview on Breaking Banks, also mentioned that Ripple Network’s native digital currency – Ripple and Bitcoin are two entirely different things and can’t be compared to each other. He mentioned that people who prefer decentralization go for Bitcoin, those interested in a more structured, regulated approach to digital currency will adopt Ripple. He however seemed to overlook the fact that XRP being a valid digital currency that can be exchanged for other cryptocoins may well be considered as a competitor of BTC. Also, the Bitcoin and Ripple protocols have few similarities when it comes to distributed ledgers and other technologies. Bitcoin aside, the company faces more challenges from players like Hyperledger and other similar ledger systems which unlike Ripple operates without any digital currency/token counterpart.