Ripple's CTO Talks About Bitcoin, Blockchain, XRP and SWIFT at SXSW 2019

On Thursday, March 14, David Schwartz presented his reflections on a wide range of topics during a session entitled "Blockchain Beyond the Hype: The Effect of Training" at the 2019 SXSW conference in Austin, in Texas.

David's comments during an interview with Sarah Silverstein, editor-in-chief and executive producer at Business Insider. Here are some highlights of this interview:

• David discovered Bitcoin in 2011. It was "love at first sight".
• It fell to Bitcoin because there was no need for a "central operator" (or "central point of trust").
• Although many members of the Bitcoin community thought that the proof of work was the "magic" element in Bitcoin, Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz and some people understood that the "secret sauce" of Bitcoin was: "all state information is public. " PoW was only one solution to the problem of double spending.
• Today, the main use case that Ripple sees for the XRP book is to settle cross-border payments between currencies because it "is really good for that".
• In the long run, he expects the price of the XRP to be "a decisive factor for the success of the ecosystem", but it is not sure that the price necessarily follows the " rational expectations ".
• His pet peeves about blockchain and crypto (that is, things he most often misunderstands about him) are: many think the price of a piece / a token is a good indicator of the success of a crypto project; that some people believe that blockchains are "very expensive" and can never "compete with conventional databases or applications"; the fact that some people do not seem to realize that "certain types of attacks are fundamentally impossible with blockchains".
• He thinks that all decentralized systems have in common the fact that "they have no party that can force others to accept the rules".
• Although SWIFT gpi "deals with some of the problems people face," he says the main problem is that "this does not allow payment at the time of payment."