Ripple vs Bitcoin is an interesting contest because what appear to be similar cryptocurrencies are in fact quite different.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009, but nobody knows who that really is because it’s a pseudonym.

What we do know is that Bitcoin was the first of a new breed of digital currency that uses cryptography and blockchain technology to make transactions safe and secure. It allows two parties to exchange value with no need for either financial authorities or governments to get involved, and that’s made it tremendously attractive.

A Bitcoin transaction takes around 10 minutes to be confirmed and accepted, which is admittedly a drawback, but the upsides to this currency continue to mean that it’s still growing in popularity as a worldwide payment option.

Ripple

The other side of Ripple vs Bitcoin is of course Ripple. It was invented by Ripple Labs, and it has some clear benefits. It lets people make fast online payments and its transaction fees are low. The name of the actual coin is XRP, and it’s a very scalable digital asset that was created with commercial use in mind. Ripple lets users transfer money all over the world quickly, thanks to its average confirmation time of only three and a half seconds.

Differences between the two

The Ripple vs Bitcoin question hangs on various differences. We’ve seen that payments are faster with Ripple, but supply is another story, as is value. There are currently 43 Billion Ripple coins in existence, and the total limit for XRP is 100 billion coins. In contrast, bitcoin has a cap of 21 million coins. Pricewise, Ripple is worth only a fraction of bitcoin at under USD 0.22 while bitcoin’s value has been as high as $15,000 and as of this writing sits at around $9700. Considering the overall market cap this puts Ripple at the number three position.

In the contest of Ripple vs Bitcoin, Ripple wins on speed, achieving a fantastic 1000 transactions a second. For the individual that means finalizing or settling a transaction in only three seconds, and as we said already, the equivalent figure for Bitcoin is more like 10 minutes.

Ripple vs Bitcoin is a contest between two coins with very different technologies. Bitcoin uses a public blockchain to validate transactions, while Ripple is pre-mined and relies on a unique distributed consensus mechanism. The servers in this network are used to confirm transactions and so there’s no need for it to be slowed down by the processor-hungry validation method involved with blockchain transactions. So, Ripple is less of a burden on the world’s resources as there are no complex mining hashes to be solved by power-hungry computers.

Bitcoin may be popular among individual users, but Ripple enjoys great popularity in the banking world. 200 financial institutions in more than 40 countries have set up a consortium called Ripplenet to allow easy cross-border payments.

With all of these factors in mind, it looks as if Ripple wins in the Ripple vs Bitcoin contest, although the markets seem to have other ideas about the real winner at the moment, as bitcoin continues to bask in its first-place position at the top of the table.