For years I've told loved ones, friends, and anyone with a passing interest in the nascent space to avoid Ripple like the plague.
Or you can ignore the nuances and complexes, say fuck it, and support a system that disables power that good organizations do need to manage bad actors - instead of turning the clock back and making the world a "free for all" - making tools like the Magnisky Act unenforceable, along with other unavoidable pitfalls that pro-Bitcoiners ignore, scoff at without rebuttal, or glance over without serious thought. Regulatory capture is real and it needs to be addressed always - and if you work from founding principles and are honest with yourself you'll come to the conclusion that centralized organizations are a necessity to fighting "evil"/bad behaviour with good, responsible, trustworthy people
The argument then goes into nuance of where the debate continues as to how conservative or liberal you are - how "small" or "big" the government is, e.g. what decision making power or function does or should government have, e.g. Universal Basic Income/UBI - the Freedom Dividend as Andrew Yang calls it - would arguably be more of traditional Conservative/Republican leaning - giving $1,000/month to individuals for THEM TO DECIDE what to do with the money vs. some bureaucratic government agency spending that money themselves making broad-vague decisions, almost always influenced by regulatory capture and industrial complexes manipulating the system via influencing politicians and the population via propaganda of various forms: "tobacco is good for you" - says your doctor, "fat is bad for you" says the sugar and health industry, "MDMA/mushrooms are bad for you" - says big pharma industry who can't patent those medicines, etc.
Edit: LUL - imagine a person actually had to put the effort into writing a qualitative response instead of getting a dopamine hit from a single click to ignore/avoid engaging.
More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system.
No, you can't; that's rather the problem.
In my last comment I highlight the main policies necessary for a big shift to be able to occur:
"Until there's a strong enough impetus and they start to learn the game to understand it: I'd considered Andrew Yang a normal person, who published a book called The War On Normal People before running for President this last election.
More people like him will come to light, especially once policy proposals he's made like Freedom Dividend/UBI, Ranked Choice Voting, Democracy Dollars, Journalism Dollars get implemented to break apart the two-party system." - from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509841
A blockchain is just an incredibly inefficient way to store those messages, giving them an explicit ordering in case they don't have internal IDs, and to establish ordering between users. All of that can be done with a simple 'index server' that doles out ordered message IDs, without the blocks, the mining, etc.
Banks don't even need the currency. Banks just settle their debts in their local currency and they trust enforcement to the courts and bailiffs. This is what Ripple had right, in the beginning. They only need a messaging layer.
Problem with Ripple is creation of new XRPs, they had full control over that.
A decentralized system is a distributed system that still works _when nodes are owned by multiple different (even competing/malicious) parties_.
See the Byzantine Generals Problem[1].