The selection of protocols is indeed quite selective.
Disclaimer: I work on IOTA.
Are we anywhere near close enough to get rid of the centralization?
I’m really excited about the project
As for the other question: once the network is more - next year?
but the title says "Ethereum Now Handles More Transactions Than All Digital Currencies Combined". note "Digital Currencies", not "blockchain currencies".
The construction of the network/consensus protocol means that Ripple would have to get a majority of all validators on the majority of everyone's UNLs to lie to reverse a transaction. Ripple likely does not have such influence /or/ if they do, then you are free to select a larger UNL set, along with the rest of the community, such that they /do not/.
Which?
And the transactions in Steemit at least are generally very low value, with 1-cent upvotes and article/comment entries making up the bulk of them. In comparison, the average value of an Ethereum transaction is $10,000.
The value of the transactions may differ, but at least the Steem transactions are more likely to be 'real', that is to say they are transferring value from one person to another. See my earlier comment about how a large proportion of ethereum 'value' is merely shuffling coins between different wallets of the same owners.
In any case, the end result is the same. There's a large amplification factor in ethereum transactions, since many transactions are just the shuffling of coins without any value actually changing hands.
(However, the story isn't crystal clear about what they mean by the 'rotation' of transactions. It says 'rotated 80 times' but I'm not sure if that means each input address goes through 80 transactions before going to an output.)
I'm not aware of other fully-public blockchains that have comparably high levels, though maybe I'm missing something. With permissioned chains it's much easier to reach high throughput.
The so-called mixer has been debunked here before. It actually looks like exchanges, and the temporary addresses they generate for deposits. That does mean that a large portion of transactions are with exchanges, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, and would be the same on Bitcoin.