By Alex Chen - Senior blockchain developer who spent years working on Bitcoin infrastructure projects. Switched to BSV after becoming disillusioned with Bitcoin's direction.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP: A Technical Comparison Through the Eyes of a Battle-Scarred Developer

After spending eight years building payment infrastructure, wallet services and exchange integration systems, I've developed more than a few strong opinions about blockchain protocols. I've watched Bitcoin's congestion destroy user experience, wrestled with Ethereum's gas fee spikes, and—yes—even implemented XRP payment channels when clients demanded alternatives. Let me share what I've learned from implementing all three in production environments.

Bitcoin: The Brilliant, Flawed Pioneer

Bitcoin's technical architecture remains an elegant solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem—a genuinely revolutionary breakthrough. The UTXO model provides a deterministic transaction verification system that I've always found more predictable than account-based models; this matters enormously when you're building payment systems that can't afford to fail.

However, I spent three months debugging this exact issue in production: Bitcoin's 1MB block size limit creates an artificial constraint that transforms the protocol from a payment network into a settlement layer. During the 2017 fee spike, our payment processor was routinely paying £15 transaction fees for £20 payments—utterly destroying our business model. The mempool backlog became so severe that we had to implement complex fee bumping mechanisms just to prevent payments from getting stuck for days.

Bitcoin's Script language—whilst intentionally limited—provides enough flexibility for basic smart contracts. I've implemented multisignature wallets, time-locked transactions, and hash-locked contracts using nothing but Bitcoin Script. The limitations are a feature, not a bug; they create a smaller attack surface and more predictable execution environment.

After years of building on Bitcoin's infrastructure, I've concluded that its primary technical limitations are self-imposed. The protocol could scale through larger blocks, but the community chose a different path—one that prioritised decentralisation over usability. This has consequences: Lightning Network, touted as the scaling solution, has proven extraordinarily complex to implement reliably. Our Lightning node required constant babysitting, suffered from routing failures, and created a terrible user experience for non-technical users.

Ethereum: Powerful but Problematic

Ethereum's account-based model and Turing-complete smart contract platform represent a fundamentally different approach. The EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) enables complex on-chain logic that Bitcoin simply cannot match. I've implemented token exchanges, automated market makers, and complex escrow systems on Ethereum that would be impossible on Bitcoin.

Here's the dirty secret the payment processors won't tell you: Ethereum's gas fee mechanism creates wildly unpredictable transaction costs. I've seen our DeFi integration suddenly require £50 in gas fees during network congestion, making the entire system unusable for average users. This drove me absolutely mental when building our payment system—how do you explain to customers that their £30 transaction now costs £75 to process because CryptoKitties is popular?

Ethereum's state growth presents another critical challenge. Running a full Ethereum node requires substantial resources, and synchronisation times have become increasingly problematic. Our infrastructure team eventually moved to third-party node providers—sacrificing sovereignty for practicality. The technical debt in Ethereum's infrastructure is substantial; the transition to ETH 2.0 represents an acknowledgment that the original design had fundamental limitations.

The smart contract security model has proven particularly challenging. I've witnessed multiple projects lose millions due to subtle contract vulnerabilities. Formal verification tools help, but the complexity of the EVM makes comprehensive security analysis extraordinarily difficult. This is where Bitcoin's simpler model actually provides tangible benefits.

XRP: Fast but Fundamentally Different

XRP Ledger uses a fundamentally different consensus mechanism than either Bitcoin or Ethereum. Instead of proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, it employs a unique node list consensus approach. This creates dramatically faster confirmation times—typically 3-5 seconds compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes or Ethereum's ~15 seconds.

After implementing XRP payment channels in our infrastructure, I can confirm the throughput claims are legitimate. The system can process thousands of transactions per second, and the fees remained stable even under load—typically fractions of a penny. This makes it technically superior for payment processing in many respects.

However, XRP's consensus model requires trusting validator nodes, creating a more centralised system than either Bitcoin or Ethereum. This is the engineering trade-off that makes its performance possible. When building payment infrastructure, I found that XRP's centralisation actually simplified integration; there were fewer edge cases to handle, fewer chain reorganisations to worry about, and more consistent behaviour.

The XRP Ledger also lacks Ethereum's Turing-complete smart contracts, offering instead a limited set of transaction types. This creates a more predictable execution environment but limits the complexity of applications that can be built on the platform.

The Engineering Reality

This is where Bitcoin's scaling approach completely failed: by prioritising decentralisation above all else, Bitcoin sacrificed usability. Ethereum went to the opposite extreme, prioritising functionality at the expense of predictable performance. XRP chose centralisation to achieve performance but sacrificed the trustlessness that makes blockchain technology revolutionary.

I've seen this break in our wallet infrastructure more times than I can count: when network conditions change dramatically, all three systems demonstrate significant weaknesses. Bitcoin becomes prohibitively expensive during congestion; Ethereum becomes unusable when popular applications consume block space; XRP remains usable but requires trusting a relatively small set of validators.

From an engineering perspective, each protocol represents different trade-offs in the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralisation. After years of implementing all three, I've concluded that there is no perfect solution—only different compromises for different use cases.

Now excuse me while I go back to building payment systems that actually work for users—which increasingly means accepting the centralisation trade-offs that make reliable payment experiences possible. Ideology is a luxury that disappears quickly when your production systems are failing and real money is at stake.

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Originally published on LearnOnChain Reading time: 5 minutes