⚫ hgtp://rodentking

A few points: 1. Decentralization in terms of transaction processing is a computational architecture, which is my primary concern on a L1 so that my tx can't be reversed or seized. There is no architecture on the XRPL that anyone needs to be concerned about in this regard and I personally know operators of servers on the UNL that are not at all aligned with Ripple and would not support any kind of reversibility. 2. The UNL list is permissioned in the sense that no one will listen to your node if you aren't on their list, but that is also true if I decide to run a fork of GETH or Bitcoin that no one else is running. Convincing others to add you to their UNL is a lot simpler on the XRPL than getting the BTC/ETH communities to accept your code fork because the population is a lot smaller. This makes critical changes easier to implement in a timely manner. 3. Economic decentralization has been the primary critique of Ripple as the primary holder of XRP, the XRPL native asset. The addressed this via a time-lock escrow years ago that releases a set amount per month that they can sell to market makers and exchanges. If you are saying they shouldn't be the economic beneficiaries of XRP given they have been a steward of it since the beginning then one must also levy this critique at Satoshi and every other Foundation that had singular knowledge of the creation and tokenomics before the rest of the worlds. That's a waste of time in my personal opinion but I respect others having a resentment over these kind of things. I personally think Satoshi is entitled to 100% of the value of his/her/its stash given their contribution to decentralized systems. At the end of the day ALL L1s rely on community consensus to establish the rules by which participants in the market decide to engage with. PoW and PoS are methods to address economic security, spam, and attacks, they are not methods for establishing consensus about what code to run on your machine, none are compulsory and neither is the XRPL. In fact I would argue the barrier to entry is lower form an economic perspective because you don't need a fleet of ASICs or a large economic stake to participate, you just need to be a cool person wanting to run hardware for the network and is willing to engage politically with others to gain their trust. I've seen this humanity first hand. With regards to counterparty risk as an investor I'll take a known and transparent actor that has been a good steward of the network and code for years, that willingly chose to cryptographically escrow their stash of XRP, over anons and secret foundations that do not have full transparency over their stash and sometimes over inflationary mechanics. To each their own, that is why we have a market so people can make these choices. The community is stronger because of it. 4. You are conflating Ripple & "the foundation" throughout the email. There is a lot more nuance to both and there are parties unaffiliated with either, on the UNL list, so frankly I can't take this part of the critique seriously until you address those. There are legitimate complaints in the XRPL community about infrastructure, funding, bias, etc. but these aren't it. Please engage with the validators in the community to learn more, it's eye opening. 5. You are correct that XRPL is not trustless at all, it is "trustful" in that you need to know who your counterparties on the network are to decide whether or not you will add them to your list of trusted parties. This may not scale to a world computer but it is significantly more economically efficient for payments and other tokenized transaction processes. Not everyone needs to be Ethereum/Solana etc.