Cory Johnson, the chief market strategist at Ripple Labs, recently claimed that the Bitcoin network “has some real technological limitations” – which include “how many transactions it can do per hour…let alone…nobody even talks [any more] about per minute.”
Johnson added that there are severe “restrictions around [bitcoin] mining and how mining is increasingly expensive … and consumes power … and also the way it [ineffectively distributes] power to the miners … presently, [about] 80% of all bitcoin is being mined in China.”
Bitcoin Miners Have Too Much Power
Johnson, a Bloomberg media editor-at-large, further noted: “There’s a tremendous amount of power that Chinese miners have over the Bitcoin network. I think that this was unintended by the designer of bitcoin, whoever she is. [But] there are other technologies. My company [Ripple Labs] has chosen to develop technology around XRP.”
Johnson continued:
XRP does not have mining. XRP does 1500 transactions [per] second. My company [Ripple Labs] has over a 150 customers in finance all over the world. [These include large] banks [and] remittance companies. Many of them are using XRP, [although] all of them are not. [The token] is being used to do transactions across borders [in order to] lower costs from 400 basis points to 40 basis points. And, from 4 days to two minutes.
Bitcoin Built Using “Poor Technology”
According to Johnson, transaction processing times can only be reduced from days to minutes or seconds by using digital currencies. However, the New York University graduate also thinks that the Bitcoin network will not be able to handle a large number of transactions as it is based on “poor technology.”
Although Johnson acknowledged he doesn’t know what bitcoin (BTC) may be worth, he does believe:
Digital assets that show fundamental use cases … and not just show it, but demonstrate it will develop a fundamental value. What that value is, [we] will have to figure out for ourselves. But I think that Bitcoin doesn’t work very well and [Ripple, the company, realized] that a long time ago. So, I am not surprised that [bitcoin is not performing well].
XRP’s Market Capitalization Down From $106 Billion To $16 Billion
Going on to discuss how XRP, the cryptocurrency developed by Ripple Labs, has been performing, Johnson pointed out that the token is actually up over a 100% this year. He also claimed that XRP is currently being used more than BTC.
However, XRP’s price is actually down considerably since the beginning of the year. On January 3, XRP was trading at around $2.75 and its market capitalization was over $106 billion. Currently, XRP is trading at only about $0.4060 according to CryptoCompare data, and its market capitalization has fallen sharply to just around $16 billion.
Many More People Want To Use XRP
It must be noted, however, that current market prices of cryptocurrencies may not be the best way to assess how well they may be performing and how much confidence investors and traders might have in their long-term potential.
As CryptoGlobe reported in mid-August, Wirex, a zero-commission crypto and fiat currency trading platform with over 1.8 million users, had conducted a survey via Twitter asking which cryptocurrency: bitcoin (BTC), litecoin (LTC), ethereum (ETH), or ripple (XRP) its followers prefer.
Notably, 81% said they would prefer to use XRP for daily purchases, and only 10% said they’d use BTC. Meanwhile, just 6% of survey respondents preferred LTC and only 3% wanted to use Ethereum’s native token, ether, for everyday transactions.
