David Schwartz Quotes

"We would love for everybody to trust us completely, but people having to trust us is all downside to us... We wouldn't want to be able to censor transactions because then people could pressure us to censor transactions."

"The XRP ledger has been running since 2012 with a global set of validators. Many, most of them are not affiliated with Ripple at all. We run something like 1% of the network."

"Ripple is a company and Ripple holds a significant amount of XRP. The XRP ledger is decentralized. Ripple has no legal right to control it and no ability to control it."

"We need our competitors to succeed. We need the ecosystem to succeed. Ripple's not going to build that ecosystem single-handedly."

"If I wanted to control the network and take over all the XRP or change the rules in some unfair way, I have to get people to run that code. And that's the ultimate governance mechanism."

"I still think the best incentive is no incentive for block production specifically... it creates artificial conflict inside the ecosystem and can cause a race to the bottom like you see with mining."

"The double spend problem is this simple: if I have one unit of a digital asset, I have to be able to create a transaction that transfers it to Alice, and one that transfers it to Bob. Both are valid. But if we disagree over which one to execute, we have a problem."

"Imagine there's two doors to the room. I challenge all of you to walk out the same door. Somebody has to commit first. When they commit, everybody else could still walk out the other door. That's the proof that consensus can never be 100% reliable."

"Once a year, Bitcoin goes an hour without producing a block. So by our standards, the Bitcoin blockchain is down most of the time."

"You can make consensus more reliable only by making it slower. If you only have a network level disruption one out of every 2,000 ledgers, how much slower would you be willing to make every single ledger to reduce that even lower?"

"It's great if they're bought in on 'this is an amazing technology that's going to change the world,' but they don't have to be bought in on that to adopt it."

"Their profit margins are razor thin. When you tokenize things like money market funds, your revenue slice is minuscule. So if you can be just the tiniest bit more efficient, that's a massive competitive advantage."

"I don't think there's a tension between institutional adoption and decentralization. Institutions are interested in layer 1 blockchains because of their decentralization, because of their neutrality."

"If RLUSD really does well, we'll have an asset whose value comes exclusively from its utility. Unlike XRP which gets value from speculation and utility, RLUSD has no value from speculation."

"If you wanted to build an optimal global settlement platform in the cryptocurrency space and you could design the perfect platform, it would look like the XRP ledger."

"The big advantage of the cryptocurrency space is that we can actually experiment. We're not trying to get Congress to pass a law. If we have an idea, we can build it and we can try it."

"Permission domains is probably the most exciting thing I've worked on in the past couple of years. If you're compliant, you stay inside the compliant portion of the ledger."

"Every transaction has to touch something. Even if your transaction doesn't interact with my transaction at all, they both have to touch the fee."

"We were always of the opinion that really complicated smart contracts should be on layer 2 because it's very hard to write complex things with no bugs."

"Vitalik was couch surfing in Stefan Thomas's living room. We tried to hire Vitalik but we couldn't for a hilarious reason."

"If you look at the early GitHub repository, Arthur and I committed multiple times a day and we were basically using GitHub like email."

"TCP, UDP and IP are stuck in the past and that's great. The middle is dumb. Interledger is that dumb stable middle for money."

"The biggest thing that I'm excited about right now is tokenized lending. DeFi lending today is overcollateralized."

"If it was a good day for Bitcoin it's probably a good day for Ethereum, probably a good day for XRP."

"There doesn't seem to be any connection between the price of XRP and the success of Ripple, which is kind of a strange thing."

"The SEC has largely been doing regulation by enforcement."

"I'm a C++ programmer. If I'm the first programmer you hire, you're going to get a C++ result. If we had it to do over today, we probably would have chosen Rust."

"I underweighted the importance of doing something that's standard, well-known and well understood versus microscopically optimizing something for your exact use case."

"You can imagine having thousands of ledgers that together we think of as the XRP ledger."

"We need an internet of value. We need a shipping container of money. We need a TCP/IP of assets."

"When you have a digital asset, it's universal in the sense that wherever it is, it can get anyplace."