Interesting read, this is news to me. The coin was already in a bear market, and I think that such conditions only increase the price drop in the market. It is surprising that a cryptocurreny with so many points of centralization has become, even for a short period of time, the second most valued in the crypto space.
That's really not so much of an issue any more.
The Chinese government could declare that no miner can build on top of a block that spends a particular bitcoin UTXO and it would be censored. There is no clear plan for how to fix this. Nobody cares enough to actually do anything about it. Whoever has the cheapest power and the best ASICs is a bitcoin stakeholder no matter what you do -- and they want high transaction fees.
Bitcoin's governance is completely paralyzed. The people who believed in bitcoin as a payment system for ordinary transactions can't operate their businesses. The idea that you can have no governance but the system works because interests are aligned has been demonstrated to not be nearly as good as we all hoped and thought it would be.
I'm not bearish on bitcoin. Bitcoin will get through this. But it shows the ridiculousness of complaining about the much less serious drawbacks of a significantly technically superior system.
1) Ripple's consensus protocol doesn't force whoever has the cheapest power and best ASICs to be a stakeholder who wants high transaction fees.
2) Ripple's currency distribution system enriches those who built, and build on, the ecosystem, not power companies and semiconductor manufacturers.
3) Transactions on Ripple confirm faster.
4) Ripple's transaction volume and transaction capacity is much higher.
5) Ripple has functional governance with a clear way for users to change the stakeholders if they don't get what they want.
6) Ripple supports security features like key rotation that are not supportable on a UTXO model.
I still think bitcoin will dominate for the foreseeable future. It got there first. It's good enough technically. There are massive network effects. And there are ways around most of these issues and none of them are deal breakers.
But the number of people making this tired argument that has not stood the test of time well are very, very few now. The facts speak for themselves.