The blockchain industry has long debated whether any network can survive a direct attack from a powerful authoritarian state. During a renewed discussion, Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz finally addressed this question for XRP, saying that XRP Ledger (XRPL) is ready to completely rewrite its "DNA" and go underground technologically, but not submit to external pressure.
Against the backdrop of news about sanctions evasion and attempts by authoritarian regimes to interfere with distributed ledgers, users asked Schwartz a direct question: what happens if nodes start being physically raided?
Why dictators are powerless against XRPL
The crypto industry veteran's answer was cold-blooded as Schwartz admitted that intelligence services are capable of causing local and short-term disruptions, but long-term control over the network is impossible.
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Any vulnerabilities or bugs they try to exploit will be fixed, because the software can always be changed, Schwartz stated, adding that the system will automatically replace compromised nodes from the dUNL list of trusted validators with new ones.
I don't think that would be very effective unless they could make it so that nobody was brave enough to run a validator. Operators would just be replaced. Validators could become anonymous and operate over tor. But it would certainly be disruptive.
If that actually did happen,…
If the pressure reaches a terminal stage and operators start being arrested, Ripple has a radical plan for evacuating consensus. Dubbed the "Doomsday" protocol, it would turn XRPL into an elusive two-layer structure hidden behind anonymous networks such as Tor and I2P:
- Inside this protocol, high-performance nodes processing current transactions would be automatically and tracelessly replaced by reserves in the event of an attack or seizure.
- The outer layer would be an ultra-light governing committee, activated only periodically to adjust the composition of the internal UNL list and operating exclusively through anonymizers, making it impossible for intelligence services to identify it.
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Schwartz summarized the philosophy of survival with an example from the highest league of crypto: imagine that an unfixable fatal flaw is discovered tomorrow in the Proof-of-Work algorithm. Would Bitcoin simply die? No, the community would instantly burn the old rules and move it to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
By the same logic, XRPL would accept any tectonic changes to its positioning, because the network will live and evolve as long as even one developer remains interested in its code.
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