Nick Szabo  🔑

It will never stop being funny that while most coins furiously debate PoW vs. PoS decentralization metrics or whether the marginal cost of staking will mimic the cost of mining, one coin just went "Uhm what? Burning energy? Staking? We just use a list lol." - and that coin is #2.

"The list" method is far "better" than PoW or PoS, many PoW advocates do not doubt that. Its just not unique when compared to traditional electronic financial architecture.

+1. And not censorship resistant at all.

The XRP argument is that censorship is detectable in practice and community suspicion of offending validators would lead to UNL removal. Through this lens I would say XRP faces a UNL coordination challenge, but not necessarily a censorship challenge.

If so they are again grossly abusing the term "community". Most communities (as a group of people who actually regularly communicate with each other) aren't much restrained when it comes to censoring transactions in their favor against those of people outside their community.

Bitcoin both (a) makes it very difficult to censor (requiring a risky and expensive fork among disparate miner and node stakeholders), and (b) backs that up with a strong ideology of immutability. XRP AFAIK falls far short on both these counts.

Yes, and I think the Ethereum DAO hardfork (ETH censoring the DAO hacker, ETC choosing not to) highlights that censorship is at its core a concern resolved by ideology & coordination and not technology.

Strong censorship resistance requires both: a strong ideology and a protocol that makes it as hard as possible violate that ideology in particular cases where minds may be changed, like Ulysses tying himself to the mast.