Ripple CTO David Schwartz and self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright clashed for the first time around the Christmas holidays in a verbal altercation on Twitter. As Bitcoinist reported, the dispute ended with Schwartz ignoring his counterpart while Wright threatened to submit a scientific paper on XRP to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as support in the lawsuit.
After a brief lull in the fight, the verbal dispute found a revival over the last two days. Wright, the leading figure behind Bitcoin SV (BSV), responded to a screenshot of a years-old tweet from Schwartz in which the Ripple CTO stated that Wright is not the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Wright didn’t let that stand, saying that the Ripple CTO doesn’t understand that it’s not “just” a computer science problem. “Not banking, not economics, not law. And this is why XRP is failing,” Wright continued.
Triggered by that statement, Schwartz settled into round two of the verbal battle, asking “curiously” what his definition of failing is. “It’s certainly not market cap given that XRP’s market cap is around $17 billion and BSV’s is less than $1 billion. Maybe it’s market volume? XRP at $330 million versus BSV at about $20 million? Nope, I guess it’s not that either,” Schwartz said, adding:
It’s your minor fork of a minor fork that’s failing by every conceivable metric as you keep lashing out at everyone who forces you to confront any tiny sliver of reality.
Ripple Can’t Scale XRP
Subsequently, the discussion evolved toward Wright’s claim that the XRP Ledger cannot scale. Both competitors debated the merits and weaknesses of XRP compared to Wright’s Bitcoin alternative – BSV. According to Wright, the blockchain that can scale will prevail, which the Bitcoin SV founder says only works with larger blocks.
The Ripple CTO countered that there are two main reasons why this is not true. “One is that I think nearly all layer 1’s will scale if there’s enough demand, whether through federation, roll ups, higher layers, or other ways,” Schwartz said.
On the other hand, Schwartz believes layer 1 doesn’t need to scale, it just needs to exist and be usable to move the vast majority of traffic to more efficient mechanisms.
[…] And my position on this has changed a few times. It’s also not a yes/no thing. It’s really a question of how much scaling will provide how much difference in value/utility. I do not believe layer 1’s will need millions of txns/sec for decades, if ever.
Calvin Ayre, Craig Wright’s verbose sidekick, countered the argument with the following words:
This is why you should stop talking…all of this can be done on chain…the tech has existed since 2009 when Craig released Bitcoin….nChain has bits of it patented now. Just shut up and watch since you clearly don’t understand.
David Schwartz was visibly annoyed by the wild name-calling:
You are responding to a reasoned argument with vague gibberish mixed with personal insults just as Craig does. I can see why you two get along so well.
Schwartz also ultimately rejected the idea that he instigated the whole affair, claiming that he was merely pointing out how wrong Wright was. Ultimately, he ended round two by saying:
He [Craig Wright] is only interested in XRP because he thinks that if I think he’s hurting XRP, I’ll stop pointing out that he’s wrong in public. He only started talking about it when I showed that an argument he made (that had nothing to do with XRP) was complete nonsense.
At press time, the XRP price stood at $0.3470 after seeing a long-legged Doji candle in the 1-day chart yesterday.
Featured image from Forbes, Chart from TradingView.com