To be honest I can't call Ripple "cryptocurrency". It is most like securities united with Paypal. There is no block or decentralized nodes. It's the same to existing bank system.
What do you mean?
Ripple does have 'blocks', but in Ripple parlance they are called 'ledgers':
- - Transactions compete to be part of the next ledger.
- - Once a majority of nodes agrees on a set of transactions, a new ledger is created and propagated through all of the network.
- - The ledger contains a list of transactions, a reference hash to the previous ledger (building a merkle chain) as well as the changed 'state' of the system, similar to how Ethereum's system changes state. This ensures that all nodes can verify locally that the listed transactions indeed result in the given state change, making forks (near?) impossible.
Nodes are definitely decentralized in Ripple:
- - Everyone can run their own node.
- - Nodes can connect to any other node. In fact, users can configure which other nodes they want to connect to exactly.
Everyone can run their own node in Bitcoin. If he has enough money of course.
The second statement it's not good, 'cause in bitcoin you can choose only numbers of inbound and outbound connections, without knowledge WHO connected to you.
Also, as i know Ripple has private transactions which are not recorded to main "blockchain". It's not good.