A long-standing debate over the decentralization of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) reignited late Sunday night with a dispute between prominent Bitcoin advocate Bram Kanstein and Ripple CTO David Schwartz.
Kanstein has recalled that the ledger’s history does not begin at "Ledger 1," but rather at "Ledger 32,570." He views this as proof that XRP is, and has always been, a centralized project.
Schwartz, however, has argued that handling of the XRP genesis "glitch" was actually an example of decentralized inaction. Moreover, the architect behind the XRPL has compared this with two famous Bitcoin incidents that he believes displayed way more centralization.
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"Bitcoin had at least two incidents that showed way more centralization than this incident did, especially since the decision in this incident was *not* to make any coordinated changes and just live with it," he said.
What is XRP Ledger 32,570?
When the XRP Ledger was launched in June 2012, a bug in the early server software caused the headers for the first week of ledgers to be improperly saved. As a result, Ledgers 1 through 32,569 were permanently lost.
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The state of the ledger was preserved and carried forward, but the history for that first week vanished.
Ledger 32,570 became the effective "Genesis" point for all public history servers.
Bitcoin's incidents
In his retort, Schwartz claimed that Bitcoin had "at least two incidents that showed way more centralization," referring to moments where Bitcoin’s stakeholders actively intervened to fix critical bugs.
Schwartz has confirmed that he was specifically referring to the value overflow bug.
"But I think you could make a good argument that it does. The biggest one I was thinking of was the coordinated 2010 rollback," he said.
This is the most critical bug in Bitcoin’s history, often cited by critics to prove that Bitcoin’s immutability relies on human intervention.
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