Difference Between Ripple and Bitcoin

The most popular cryptocurrency today is Bitcoin. Most people choose Bitcoin for mining these days. But due to the growing price of Bitcoin, it is becoming tougher to mine Bitcoin. The supply is limited, and many investors cannot get the chance to mine a large amount of Bitcoin.

There are many other options that you can choose for mining such as Ripple, Ethereum, doge, and others cryptocurrency. In this blog, we will discuss Ripple and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies and the Difference between Ripple and Bitcoin.

What is Ripple (XRP)?

Ripple (XRP) is a kind of cryptocurrency that is used to do payments between the different banks in various currencies of government. Ripple was developed in the year 2011 by 3 engineers. They wanted to develop a good alternative to Bitcoin that can work at low energy and can be used for payment.

Engineers created a distributed ledger known as “XRP Ledger”. This ledger can be shared in many countries among several people. It has an open-source code to develop digital assets known as Ripples. A new name XRP was given to Ripples a few years back.

This group of engineers developed a company known as Ripple. Around 80% of the 100 billion XRP produced was given to this company. Ripple uses both XRP and XRP ledger to do cross-currency payments to financial industry customers that use this system.

What is Bitcoin (BTC)?

Bitcoin (BTC) was developed in the year 2009 by a group of people known as Satoshi Nakamoto. It is the first decentralized cryptocurrency to use a blockchain kind of distributed ledger.

In a blockchain system, the new transactions are added in blocks of information that are put together in a chain. Every new block includes encrypted information about the blocks that are produced. If you want to change one block, it is important to change the previous block in a chain. If you want to change the following block, it is important to change the block that you altered previously.

In the case of the Bitcoin mining process, Bitcoin’s blockchain ledger depends on several participants who have the same information. This information increases the security of the blockchain ledger and keeps it decentralized. Blockchain technology does not have any single authority but works on a decentralized system.

The process to mine new Bitcoins is known as Mining. In this process, the miners will receive rewards in the form of new coins for offering computing power in the process of transaction verification. After the transactions are verified, they are added to the block in the system. Every miner who created the block gets a reward of 6.25 Bitcoins.

Major Differences Between Ripple (XRP) and Bitcoin (BTC)

After discussing the points on Ripple (XRP) and Bitcoin (BTC), we will further discuss the differences between these 2 cryptocurrencies by determining the various factors such as: 

1. Speed And Transaction Fees

Bitcoin mining is a complicated process and it takes more time than ripple mining. It also has higher transaction costs than Ripple Mining. On the other hand, Ripple (XRP) transactions are confirmed within a few minutes. So, XRP transactions have lower transaction costs than Bitcoin transactions.

2. Circulation Mechanisms

Bitcoins are added to the network when miners search for them. There is no release schedule for Bitcoin and its supply varies according to the network speeds and algorithm difficulty that is used to mine different coins.

In the ripple mining machine, the smart contract controls the release of XRP coins. Ripple intended to release around 1 billion XRP tokens every month as governed by an in-built smart contract. The current circulation of XRP tokens is around 55 billion.

The unused part of XRP coins will be transferred back to an escrow account. This system reduces the misuse of XRP crypto coins. It will take a long time before the crypto coins are made available in the market.

3. Payments

Ripple (XRP) coins are used to make payments between different banks in various government-backed currencies. They can be traded as speculative investment. On the other hand, BTC can be used as an alternative to make purchases. It is a kind of decentralized currency and can be traded as a speculative investment.

4. Number of Coins In The Market

Around 1 billion XRP coins were pre-mined at launch and total supply chain is 99.9 million. They are released over a few years in the market. On the contrary, the total supply of Bitcoin (BTC) is around 21 million. The limited supply of Bitcoin has helped the miners to save Bitcoins for the future.

5. Rewards

There are no block rewards in ripple miner as Ripples (XRP) coins are already mined. On the other hand, every miner will receive 2 Ethers (ETH) by mining one block of Bitcoin in Bitcoin Mining hardware.

6. Number of Transactions Per Second

In ripple mining hardware, the number of transactions processed per second is 1.500. Contrary to that, a Bitcoin Mining machine can process around 10 transactions per second.

7. Hashing Algorithm

In the case of Ripple mining, the hashing algorithm used is Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm or RPCA. On the other hand, the Bitcoin miner will use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm for mining new coins.

8. Energy Cost

The cost of one Ripple transaction is very low. On the other hand, the energy used in carrying out one Bitcoin transaction is around 250 kilowatts per hour.

9. Main Focus

The main focus of Ripple is on carrying out payments in any kind of currency. On the other hand, the focus of Bitcoin is put always on new currencies.

Final words

We discussed the Difference between Ripple and Bitcoin in terms of different points. Ripple coins are normally used for the settlement of payments and currency exchange. Bitcoin can be used as a crypto-currency for making payments for goods and services.

You can pick the best Cryptocurrency mining machine to start mining Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other kinds of cryptocurrencies. You can also join a mining pool to reduce the transaction cost of Bitcoin mining.