CTO of Ripple, David Schwartz recently spoke about the key differences between Bitcoin (BTC) and XRP on Ripple’s official YouTube channel. The official opinions of the CTO also regarded the differences in transaction malleability between the two cryptocurrencies.
Schwartz started his comments stating that there are 2 basic groups of differences between the BTC and XRP: “one is that XRP uses consensus instead of proof of work like Bitcoin. The other is that XRP has from the beginning been built in such a way that it has the ability to transact arbitrary assets like dollars or Yuans… As far as transaction malleability goes, Bitcoin and XRP basically have similar issues because XRP also has transaction IDs and users are also able to mutate the XRP signature”.
In addition, Schwartz mentioned that XRP is not vulnerable in one aspect of transaction malleability the way Bitcoin is. In the case of Ripple users refer to previous outputs by account instead of transaction ID and hence there is “no way a user or a miner can cause another user’s transactions to jam”.
“I like to model the protocol to a room full of people who constantly agree with each other. So if you want to perform a transaction in XRP, you basically walk into this metaphorical room and read out the transaction. If the transaction is valid and there is no reason it shouldn’t be agreed on, essentially everybody in the room nods, ‘yep that looks good to me’… These validators compute a new ledger in which the said transaction has taken place and they all agree on the hash of the new ledger”, continued Schwartz.
At the end the CTO also commented on the major double spending problem stating: “the malleability problem in XRP still exists if one attempts to track transactions by ID. A user would never say, ‘oh this transaction didn’t go through, I better send another one’. But if they did, then they could potentially be tracked. So we’re going to close that hole completely by using a solution similar to what Bitcoin uses. We will be announcing that in a couple days”.
