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It may be helpful to talk about consensus based systems like Stellar and Ripple. Is this included in your altcoins section?

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I took the course this semester (and loved it--hope the materials can be helpful to all).

We had one assignment that focused on achieving consensus in the face of adversarial nodes, similar to the systems used in Stellar and Ripple, so those were included in the course, to a degree.

Thanks for the suggestion. We discuss it briefly, and one of the programming assignments is based on Ripple. It could use a deeper discussion, I'll work on that.

Don't forget to mention that their consensus algorithm simply doesn't work. That's why they made it 100% centralized "temporarily" (without even asking, so apparently it was 100% centralized even before that). They themselves said exactly that in a blog post. Also, the creator of Ripple dumped all his coins before joining Stellar.

Here's the Stellar team's blog post about this. While there's no attempt to conceal this, it's also not being spelled out clearly enough: the Ripple/Stellar "consensus" model is a centralized and does NOT provide the guarantees which Proof-of-Work does in Bitcoin.

https://www.stellar.org/blog/safety_liveness_and_fault_toler...

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