David Schwartz, Ripple’s newly appointed CTO Emeritus and co-creator of the XRP Ledger, has described Bitcoin as “a technological dead end.”
He argues that the world’s largest cryptocurrency no longer relies on technological innovation for its success.
Schwartz recently revealed that he had sold nearly all of his Bitcoin holdings for $7,500.
“Technology just doesn’t seem to matter”
The comment came in response to a question from an XRP community member, who asked if Schwartz had considered working on Bitcoin development again. The former Ripple CTO, however, has bluntly rejected the idea.
“Not really. I think bitcoin is largely a technological dead end for the same reason the dollar is,” Schwartz wrote. “The technology just doesn’t seem to matter all that much to its success, at least not at the blockchain layer.”
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The implication is that Bitcoin has fossilized into a monetary standard where “upgrades” are secondary to stability.
Schwartz’s recent Bitcoin takes
Schwartz has frequently challenged the narrative that Bitcoin is purely decentralized and permissionless.
“In more than a decade, no XRP transaction has ever been censored or treated unfairly while bitcoin miners routinely delay transactions they disfavor for any reason at all,” he stated in December.
Recently, he also noted that the leading cryptocurrency had had at least two incidents that showed much more centralization than the XRPL genesis glitch.
In November, he argued that all blockchains, including Bitcoin, rely on human intervention during crises. “Any problem with XRP can be fixed by XRPL’s governance, as Bitcoin had to do in 2013. And it will be because every chain’s governance cares,” he wrote.
He has also raised concerns about Bitcoin’s proof-of-work consensus algorithm. He outlined a potential death spiral scenario, where “people really want bitcoin to remain PoW because they see that as part of its core value,” but high prices and low transaction volumes create a security vacuum.