Speaking at the 2018 Stifel Cross Sector Insight Conference in Boston, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse said that “Bitcoin is really controlled by China”.
In the latest interview with Stifel Tech Analyst Lee Simpson, the CEO probed into a number of subjects related to blockchain technology and the crypto world. He asserted that BTC is under the control of China, saying:
“I’ll tell you another story that is underreported, but worth paying attention to. Bitcoin is really controlled by China. There are four miners in China that control over 50 percent of Bitcoin. How do we know that China won’t intervene? How many countries want to use a Chinese-controlled currency? It’s just not going to happen.”
The Ripple CEO also expressed his outlook about BTC’s and XRP’s principal technology, the blockchain, arguing that it “will not disrupt banks,” though “it will play an important role in the way our system works,” however “it’s a short-sighted view.”
Garlinghouse said that “Bitcoin today takes 45 minutes to settle a transaction,” while Ripple’s XRP takes 4 seconds to settle, he declared. He illustrated it as “the best digital asset for settlement.”
According to the BitMex report on Ripple and the XRP token, the team carried out an internal test with Ripple’s technology. The team fixed and ran a copy of Rippled, the node operated by downloading five public keys from the Ripple’s server, all of which were allocated to Ripple.com. Four of the five keys were reportedly necessary to sustain an application in order for it to be accepted.
“Since the keys were all downloaded from the Ripple.com server,” the report says, “Ripple is essentially in complete control of moving the ledger forward, so one could say that the system is centralized.”
A new study by University of Texas’ staff released today, proposes that half of the BTC price surge in December last year was clearly due to Tether and issuer Bitfinex. The paper explains transaction patterns, which show that Tether was “used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.” It is affirmed that purchases with Tether were “timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices.”
