Ripple CTO says that XRP transactions cannot be blocked

Recently, a Quora user asked if XRP transactions could be blocked by Ripple or by a third-party. This simple question touched upon a long, ongoing debate about Ripple’s level of decentralization, and whether or not its native blockchain and XRP token are directly under the firm’s control. David Schwartz, Ripple CTO, who came to the defense of the company, clarified that Ripple is not a centralized network and that there is no real way that one could stop XRP transactions from being processed. 

He said:

There is currently no way to stop valid transactions from executing. Because the network is decentralized, nothing stops someone from writing code that blocks transactions currently considered valid and trying to convince people to run that code. It would take convincing a majority to run that code to stop those transactions.

Recently in an interview with CNN, Ripple CEO, Brad Garlinghouse said that “Ripple cannot control the price of XRP anymore than whales control the price of Bitcoin”. He said that XRP exhibits a strong correlation to the altcoin market and that the asset’s high daily volume would make it difficult to manipulate. 

Addressing the increasing concerns about Ripple Labs dumping XRP on to the exchanges, he said:

Yes, Ripple owns a lot of XRP, we’re very interested in the success of XRP, but the accusations of us dumping, that’s not in our best interests to do that. We would never do that and in fact, we’ve taken steps to lock up most of the XRP we own in escrows so we can’t touch it.

Continuing his thread about Ripple being decentralized, Schwartz said that distributed networks gain their value from being censorship-resistant. This explains why a network majority would want to block valid transactions. 

The general consensus is that decentralized networks have value precisely because valid transactions can’t easily be stopped. So it would be very unlikely that you could gather enough people who wanted them to be stopped together to form a meaningful majority. How can the majority of those who find value in a network agree to destroy the very thing that they believe gives the network value?

Though Schwartz’s arguments make sense from a decentralized network view, it does not explain what would happen if an international government authority asked Ripple to suspend activity on the network.