Ripple CTO David Schwartz and Craig Wright—posting under the pseudonym S. Tominaga—recently clashed on X over governance in decentralized networks. Wright accused Schwartz of attempting to project XRP-style control mechanisms onto systems like Bitcoin that have no centralized authority. Schwartz argued his critique relies on a Ripple-style model where changes are expected, coordinated, and sometimes imposed, not as a universal standard.
According to Schwartz, if there are groups that want to change the system, they must be actively restrained from doing so, using the same mechanisms that could otherwise be used to implement changes. Wright emphasized that in a fixed system, changes are not “prohibited” socially, they are simply not adopted by independent participants, as has been the case for decades with the TCP protocol. The trigger for the dispute was Wright’s claim that a stable protocol does not require authority or coordination.
According to Wright’s position, Schwartz is describing systems in which certain actors do in fact control the evolution of rules, and is projecting this experience onto protocols such as Bitcoin, which were specifically designed to eliminate the very possibility of such control. The dispute highlights competing views of governance in decentralized networks.
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