I can totally understand your criticism, thanks for that! We are pretty new on bitcointalk and tried to work together with somebody helping us with the community support. We learned from that and will now keep going with our internal team only.


However, I am happy to answer your question. To establish speedy transactions we do two things. First of all, we use a DAG as a data structure. Of course, this is not something new. We have already seen this for cryptocurrencies like Nano before. Secondly, we use the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) for validating conflicting transactions. Since SCP is also pretty fast, we can provide fast transactions even with validating each of them. In the end, it also depends on the trust level a client wants on a transaction. If the receiver of a transactions trusts the sender directly, they don't have to wait for the consensus before "accepting the payment". In all other cases, the receiver and sender will have to wait a few seconds for the consensus to be established. In addition to the consensus, we are already thinking about off-chain trust providers that can provide trust faster than the consensus but that is more under construction and not ready to be released as a concept at the moment.

Regarding the centralization: SCP allows full decentralization because it allows all nodes to decide whom they trust. With that, there must not be a fixed set of nodes but instead, nodes can join at any time. A very simplified explanation of SCP can be found at http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/blog/simplified-scp.html

We are currently also working on a visualization of SCP that we can hopefully launch on our website within the next months.