Ripple’s chief technology officer has responded to a conspiracy theory fabricated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT, which alleges the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is somehow being secretly controlled by Ripple.
According to a Dec. 3 Twitter thread by user Stefan Huber, when asked a series of questions regarding the decentralization of Ripple’s XRP Ledger, the ChatGPT bot suggested that while people could participate in the governance of the blockchain, Ripple has the “ultimate control” of XRPL.
Asked how this is possible without the consensus of participants and its publicly-available code, the AI alleged that Ripple may have “abilities that are not fully disclosed in the public source code.”
At one point, the AI said “the ultimate decision-making power” for XRPL “still lies with Ripple Labs” and the company could make changes “even if those changes do not have the support of the supermajority of the participants in the network.”
It also contrasted the XRPL with Bitcoin (BTC) saying the latter was “truly decentralized.”
However, Ripple CTO David Schwartz has called the bot’s logic into question, arguing that with that logic, Ripple could secretly control the Bitcoin network as it neither can be determined from the code.
If it's final argument is that Ripple Labs "may have" some secret way to control the XRP Ledger that cannot be determined from the public code, why not argue that Ripple Labs "may have" some secret way to control the bitcoin blockchain that cannot be determined from the code?
The bot was also shown to contradict its own statements in the interaction, stating that the main reason for using “a distributed ledger like the [XRPL] is to enable secure and efficient transactions without the need for a central
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