> To solve this, they have made the system entirely centralized
True for Stellar, untrue for Ripple. It's a stopgap while they work things out and reimplement the consensus algorithm; as the article said, distributed systems are hard. And I'd rather they try to replace mining with something not horribly energy-inefficient than assume that PoW is the only way to achieve consensus.
And yes, their ledgers are blockchains, they work in identical fashion, with consensus replacing mining.
True for Stellar, untrue for Ripple. It's a stopgap while they work things out and reimplement the consensus algorithm; as the article said, distributed systems are hard. And I'd rather they try to replace mining with something not horribly energy-inefficient than assume that PoW is the only way to achieve consensus.
And yes, their ledgers are blockchains, they work in identical fashion, with consensus replacing mining.