Quote from: Cart on July 09, 2017, 05:08:18 PM

Is it true that the Ripple company could basically release new coins whenever they like? Isn't this quite centralized then?

No. There is no way in the protocol to say "I just created 50,000 coins out of nowhere". The software is open source, you can check it out yourself.

Even if you want to argue that our servers might run some other software, that wouldn't matter, because nobody else's servers (like exchanges and explorers) would listen to us if we told them that a transaction had made funds appear out of nowhere.

You can check out the software yourself. Not only is there no way to say that coins were created out of nowhere, there is explicit code that checks for this condition and reject it just in case a bug or subterfuge let through some way to do it:
https://github.com/ripple/rippled/blob/develop/src/ripple/app/tx/impl/InvariantCheck.cpp#L25-L81

The only thing you can't do with deterministic rules is ensure that everyone tries to execute transactions in the same order. That is the key function of validators.