Ripple CTO: Blockchain is more complex than Interledger

Baozou Comment : Blockchain is more complex than Interledger protocol, but it is widely favored by the financial industry, but not valued by large technology companies. The reason is that the financial industry is more tolerant of complex systems. In the case of the World Wide Web defeating Xanadu, which appeared in the 1960s, there are many reasons why the World Wide Web won in the end, but its stateless architecture is the key to success. Interledger protocol allows its users to choose a ledger with a consensus mechanism, and can also choose currency, performance characteristics and anonymity according to their own ideas.

Translation: Nicole

In his new opinion piece on Medium, Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas explains why he believes blockchain is a more complex technology than the Interledger protocol.

In a recent blog post, he said:

“Blockchain is a complex technology. Everyone who has come into contact with blockchain knows what I mean. The fact is that blockchain has not been taken seriously by large technology companies, but it has been embraced by the financial industry because the financial industry has a relatively high acceptance of mysterious and complex systems.”

The open source developer and distributed system advocate who has been studying Interledger cited the case of Xanadu and the World Wide Web to illustrate his point, saying that Xanadu was much earlier than the World Wide Web, appearing in the 1960s. But the World Wide Web still beat Xanadu, even though Xanadu was more ambitious than the World Wide Web.

Stefan Thomas

He explained:

There are many reasons why the World Wide Web won out, but I think its stateless architecture was the key to its success. Xanadu was decentralized, but the World Wide Web was much easier to operate, with only a mini-protocol and simple data formats. Websites didn't need to interact with each other, which meant that each website could evolve independently. Instead of waiting for Xanadu's creators to add features, users of the World Wide Web could create many features by changing the website or client.

InterLedger itself is not a ledger, as it does not require any consensus. Rather, InterLedger provides a top-level encrypted escrow system that enables the flow of funds between ledgers with the help of intermediaries, ensuring the security of the flow of funds between ledgers, and allowing anyone with an account on the two ledgers to establish a connection, without requiring a globally collaborative system or blockchain.

Thomas said that stateless protocols like the World Wide Web can gradually improve all aspects of the system.

He is against using blockchain to replace centralized functions, or to avoid all centralization. As a centralized state system - (the computer science term everyone remembers), he said that maintaining shared state is the difficulty of updating the blockchain, and shared state increases the difficulty greatly and will have a huge impact on developers.

Recalling the Ethereum hard fork proposal after the DAO attack and the growing frustration with the digital currency community, he said Interledger is not like in blockchain, where everyone has to think alike.

More specifically, the Interledger protocol allows its users to choose a ledger with a consensus mechanism, as well as the currency, performance characteristics and anonymity level they want, while also allowing them to seamlessly trade with people who make different choices within these categories.