> 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

> 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.