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In his recent interaction with CoinDesk.com, Federal Reserve Bank’s Vice President and Research Director David Andolfatto acknowledged Ripple network for utilizing Bitcoin’s original ledger at its best.
His statement, which was focused on how Bitcoin technology could bring genuine benefits to US central bank’s real-time settlement system, suddenly found Ripple as a reference to the true potential of Bitcoin’s public ledger system. According to Andolfatto, the Federal System could utilize a distributed ledger system to keep all the books simultaneously in their member banks. So in case of a system breakdown, the records could be recovered from the ledger.
“You could actually see which bank is sending money to which bank on this ‘Fedcoin blockchain,’ so if the Fed was to make an emergency loan to one of these entities you’d be able to observe who is the recipient of the loan and how much,” stated Andolfatto by drawing an imaginative scenario to elaborate his point.
He couldn’t be wrong as Ripple does exactly the same thing which he currently visions for Federal Banking Systems. Ripple software offers its users a home-grown wallet to trade Bitcoins for its private currency XRP, as well as fiats like US Dollar and Euro, in a distributed order book. It overall makes the process of withdrawing and depositing money distributable, as funds could be used to buy/sell Bitcoins from any of the listed order books, not just one.
“This [Andolfatto’s reference] seems to confirm Ripple is a winner in the inter-banking gateway business. Good for Ripple Labs (and XRP price),” said a Ripple enthusiast.
Andolfatto meanwhile also indicated that Fed economists are not thinking about implementing such a technology for now, citing their prior engagements as the biggest reason. “The thing to keep in mind is that there’s a lot on the minds of fed economists these days,” he added.
Do share your views on Fed official’s views in the comment section below.
Images from Ripple and Wikipedia.
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tommytrain 
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This makes no sense. While it’s true that Ripple predates Bitcoin, it simply isn’t true that the “original ledger” of Bitcoin is Ripple’s — the satoshi whitepaper is a testament to that fact. Headline is misleading.
The original Ripple was a way of tracking balances between different issuers on a network. It was most certainly a ledger, just not a crypto ledger. It was definitely in existence pre-bitcoin too. Perhaps the article’s author used the wrong phrasing?
> just not a crypto ledger.
It was from very early on a project to make a crypto-ledger, Jorge Timon and the like had already come to the conclusion that that was necessary before 2009. Then Bitcoin happened, and showed us that it could, in principle, be done. Finding the first post where crypto was used in this way would be an interesting exercise, but unfortunately some of the original forums are already starting to be lost to history.
Also: apparently relevant patents in the area of digital cash wouldn’t expire until 2014, anyway.
Misleading, speculative and erroneous at best, move to xrptalk–>speculation–>spam
Agreed. This article was definitely unclear and confusing. Mixing the two technologies just confuses everyone and does not help our cause. Unless the writer wants to do that?