LOL, the caps lock is due to the cut and paste on my part directly from the article though.
And thanks for the meriting!!! That is appreciated H
2.
Btw, another contrast btwn Stellar and Ripple is that Stellar is distributing the coins collected from very small fees (as one of their mechanism to prevent DDoS attacks) to the community via periodic airdrops. A good % of the XLM tokens were also distributed to the common people via airdrops. Stellar adopts a slight inflationary policy (in contrast with Ripple's small coinburn from every transactions made) as a method to prevent "coin-death" (i.e. coins in addresses where owners were either dead, have lost their password, and etc.) to ensure the long term health of the XLM currency.
But I believe the biggest thing Stellar have it going for them is their partnership with IBM and with the massive NEO-ecosystem.
Because Jed McCaleb (the genius/brains behind the Ripple network) had already left the Ripple company after falling out with the other top-executives due to differences in vision that he has.
He then moved on to create the Stellar network from scratch, an improved version of his idea/design for Ripple, based on what he had learnt when he built the Ripple network that have now been taken over by the corporate minded executives.
Ripple is a for-profit company servicing the "too-big-to-fail" banks; while Stellar is a non-profit organization aiming to bank the unbanked (starting their adoption push in developing countries) -- functioning as a decentralized bank for the people rather than servicing centralized for-profit banks with money-sucking executives and CEO.
Stellar is also tightly partnering with IBM, and which is now part of the NEO mega-ecosystem too (together with Ontology, Elastos, OnChain, and so on..).
Stellar also now has its own DEX and can support ICOs too.