In response to a query, Ripple’s current CTO David Schwartz shares the first conversation he had with the firm’s former CTO and Co-founder Jed McCaleb.
To a question that is the Ripple’s XRP Ledger the first disturbed ledger that was not based on PoW(proof of work), Ripple CTO David Schwartz responded that actually when McCaleb was hiring him back in 2011, the main question was whether he could ‘swap out PoW for a distributed agreement algorithm more like PBFT and keep Bitcoin’s benefits’.
Yep. When Jed McCaleb first hired me back in 2011, the question he hired me to answer was whether you could swap out PoW for a distributed agreement algorithm more like PBFT and keep bitcoin's benefits.https://t.co/RRiKZyuz01
— 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚣 (@JoelKatz) October 12, 2022
In the tweet Schwartz shared a link to a 1999 paper that illustrated a new replication algorithm that is immune to so-called ‘Byzantine faults’. The paper explained that as software errors and malicious attacks become more common, an algorithm that is Byzantine-fault tolerant becomes very important.
Matt Hamilton also jumped into the discussion as the former XRPL developer wrote that for him XRPL is the first open-source ledger ever that did not rely on PoW(proof of work). He stated that after Bitcoin XRPL was the second major blockchain and though Litecoin was also launched during the same time, it is not the same thing as it was basically the fork of Bitcoin. He concluded that in his view the other blockchains that existed at that point were PoW(proof of work).
As far as I'm aware, yes. The XRP Ledger was the second major blockchain after Bitcoin. Litecoin was about the same time as XRPL, but was a fork of Bitcoin. I think all others around that time used PoW.
— Matt Hamilton (@HammerToe) October 12, 2022
It is important to mention that Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz and Arthur Britto began working in XRP Ledger back in 2011. During June 2011, Britto uploaded lines of code as a result of which 100 billion ‘XNS’ tokens came into being. Notably, While June 2nd, the date on which Britto had successfully uploaded lines of the code, is celebrated as XRP’s birthday, the coin, XRP, wss actually launched during December 2012.
