The Race to Replace Bitcoin - An epic battle between two bitcoin 2.0 contenders grips the crypto world

Link: http://observer.com/2015/02/the-race-to-replace-bitcoin/

Description: A remarkably in-depth investigative piece on Ripple and Stellar, including profiles on prominent leaders within the companies.

Courtesy of @Ben.

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Stellar people have been spamming the Peercoin forum lately. I sincerely hope that’s not how they plan on taking over.

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You know, it didn’t even occur to me until just now that it was Joyce Kim who spammed the peercointalk forum yesterday, right? She was not portrayed very well in the article. One sampling:

In fact, Ms. Kim has a history of wreaking havoc wherever she goes. Beloved Silicon Valley figure Om Malik hired her to work at GigaOm. The next thing anyone knew, Ms. Kim was his emergency contact person. When he suffered a heart attack, Ms. Kim basically controlled access to him, becoming the co-anchor of his popular newscast in the meantime. Even in the bizarre world of Silicon Valley, where failure is viewed as a prelude to success, Ms. Kim’s propensity for bad decisions and losing others’ money stands out. “Joyce has this strange history,” said one Silicon Valley insider. “She was like a corporate attorney for a short period then flamed out. Then she was a VC for like six weeks. That flamed out. She had a start-up thing, which flamed out. She’s got kind of a series of train wrecks.”

That view was confirmed by Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, which has backed Flixster, Mic, LivingSocial and Bonobos, plus crypto bigwigs like Blockchain and BTCChina. Mr. Liew declined to speak to the Observer, but he told a friend of his that Ms. Kim was a “train wreck” at the venture fund Freestyle, which was founded by Dave Samuel and Josh Felser after they sold Spinner (to AOL for $320 million) and Grouper (to Sony for $65 million). “Joyce lasted only six weeks at Freestyle before becoming an ‘advisor,’ ” Mr. Liew told his friend.

Ms. Kim’s brief time at Ripple Labs—six weeks in total—did nothing to enhance her management credentials.

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Wow, I thought it was just some random Stellar supporter spamming, but this means it could have been somebody on the official team? That’s pretty bad. I’d drop that person quick if I were them. It would have been acceptable to post a thread in the altcoin board, not fill the entire forum with spam.

What is your opinion on these two by the way. Do you think they’re anything to worry about? I remember reading that they’re not even decentralized, but I don’t know the facts.

I’m not well-versed enough on either project to comment substantively. Perhaps @Marshall could share his viewpoint on how the goals of Ripple/Stellar differ from Nu if he feels inclined.

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Hey guys, I see the difference between Ripple/Stellar and Nu as being pretty big. Nu is PoS and based upon Peercoin whereas Stellar is a fork of the Ripple protocol and relies upon a completely different consensus method. 100 billion XRP/STR were created with ledger, whereas NBT are voted into creation.

The main difference is that Ripple/Stellar are reliant upon “gateways” to get fiat into the system, and to manage it. Whereas Nu is reliant upon the custodians to manage NuBot.

Ripple is developing serious banking connections… However, banks move slow, it’s just the way it works.

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