Bitcoin vs Ripple: Is the decentralization of cryptocurrencies at risk?

A few days ago, 9 years were celebrated since the mining of the Bitcoin genesis block. It is inevitable for me to think about the origin of the mother cryptocurrency and its path for almost a decade to this day.

9 years ago the world suffered the explosion of the housing bubble. After years of accumulating wealth by negotiating with others' money, the richest men in the world demanded from the State (the people ultimately) a monetary injection to rescue the banks. In the middle of this financial crisis, and as escape to slavery that supposes being subject to the decisions of politicians and bankers, Satoshi Nakamoto creates a decentralized transaction system to which he named Bitcoin.

Of course, the Bitcoin idea did not come from nothing. Nakamoto was based on multiple developers and whose research work was key to the development of Bitcoin. However, Nakamoto added the fundamental piece, cryptography and trust: distributed consensus or, in other words, blockchain, a tool to eliminate intermediaries from the equation and enable the direct relationship without the need for a central organization. Being an open source tool, anyone would be able to replicate it to continue developing new functionalities of technology. The idea, essentially, was to change the foundations of our society and the way in which we relate.

Almost a decade has passed since this idea was conceived and the block that generated blockchain was mined. Reality is far from the hope that was then.

While there are a lot of projects, developers and investors that remain true to the values of Bitcoin and continue to create and support tools that decentralize society, the truth is that many new adopters have spread the idea that cryptocurrencies are a scheme to get rich without giving any importance to decentralization. Proof of this are the millions of dollars collected in ICO for projects that do not offer solutions to real problems, but only promises of rapid enrichment for their investors. The criptomercado grows in adoption, yes, but due to greed, not so much for functionality.

Even developers of the stature of Vitalik Buterin, creator of a blockchain as important as Ethereum, have threatened to leave the ecosystem if the community does not stop being distracted by price games.

Nothing else in the case of bitcoin, which was born to serve as digital money and eliminate commissions paid to intermediaries, has become a deposit of immovable value due to the huge commissions that it is necessary to pay to make the smallest transfer. Currently having Bitcoin is like owning a Lamborghini without wheels.

One of the problems is the weighting of the success of the projects due to their market capitalization. Some coins launched at ICO sell their tokens at very attractive prices with an extremely high supply, so that by multiplying the price by the circulating quantity, the capitalization is of such dimension that the project scales in a few months to the top of the ranking of cryptocurrencies. This has happened with various currencies that are pure promise, they do not have any current functionality and it can not be known if at any moment they will have it.

And the truth is that traders, both in the crypto ecosystem and on Wall Street, tend to be people of few scruples when it comes to seek enrichment. It is very easy to manipulate the price of cryptoactives. There are groups of Telegram and other social networks and messaging applications where massive purchases of a crypto are organized to inflate its price. Seeing the increase, people outside these groups invest also for fear of being left out, until these groups decide that it is time to sell, thus collapsing, in brief moments, a brief and unfounded ascent.

While it is true that there is nothing wrong with wanting to get rich, perhaps if it is, get it at the expense of the objectives of the blockchain project, because in the long term, we will all be harmed if the project does not work.

Ripple was the cryptocurrency that grew the most in 2017, multiplied its price 438 times, not without justification. The Ripple network was tested and adopted by many institutions last year. Precisely the institutions that Bitcoin and blockchain sought to eliminate: banks. Ripple is a Trojan horse in the ecosystem, but as its price goes up, everyone invests.

Ripple is a centralized blockchain, with absolute control over currency issuance, transaction validation and project development. Ripple is the demonstration of how bankers have taken advantage of what was initially a tool to eliminate them, to become stronger. Ripple shows that the community that promised decentralization became a community of mercenaries that fights in the ranks of centralization for money.

The mass media will continue insisting that decentralized cryptocurrencies are a bubble that will explode at any moment "because nobody controls them", and will continue promoting centralized projects because they "give more confidence". But if the community keeps focusing on investing in any currency just because its price rises, without knowing who is behind the project, if we continue to behave like mercenaries, it seems clear who will win in the centralization-decentralization battle.

However, there is still time for blockchain, it is necessary to make a turn of the wheel. It's time to remember; how, why and for what blockchain was born and the cryptocurrencies. We have to investigate and learn what this movement essentially is about. It is necessary to continue creating functional projects that solve real problems. Disseminate technology, not because of how much this or another cryptocurrency has gone up, but because of the benefits it offers to society, and because of the freedoms it guarantees.

If we persist in the greedy attitude of the last couple of years, it is likely that blockchain is only a tool for deepening supervision and centralization by those who already control the financial system and much more. It is up to the members of this community to prevent this from happening.