> This paragraph does not explain how they are different from Ripple's approach only that they are in fact different.

I think the last line sums it up: "SCP is the first Byzantine agreement protocol to give each participant maximum freedom in choosing which combinations of other participants to trust."

As opposed to Ripple, where the trust is heavily biased towards the starter membership list, making it more centralized than one would want.

> As opposed to Ripple, where the trust is heavily biased towards the starter membership list, making it more centralized than one would want.

It’s biased because of a technical issue (consensus must be reached). How does the Stellar protocol solve this technical issue?

How exactly does that work?

To me, the statement says essentially "you can trust us more than Ripple" with no explanation as to why.

The explanation is in the PDF. OP was just pointing out the high-level description of how it's different. Obviously, the devil's in the details.

Your doubt is legit, afterall they may not be so different:

https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Jed-McCaleb-leave-Ripple-to-st...

Response from Jed that I stumbled on the last time I was researching this. Oddly enough, I cannot find the response on Quora anymore.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellar/comments/7n8ntb/david_schwa...

> David I always enjoyed working with you and I thought we had a degree of respect for each other so I'm pretty disappointed in your tone here. I don't really want to get into a big back and forth about this but this just isn't correct. When I left ripple the board was 2 people; myself and Chris.

> I left because I made the mistake of bringing Chris on as CEO and it ended up being untenable to work with him for a variety of reasons.

> I feel like I've been extremely restrained in my criticism of ripple despite the frivolous lawsuits from you guys the constant attacks on my character and my family. I know you are actually a good person but I think you are in too deep to see how horrible Chris has acted toward me.

> Stellar hasn't abandoned the idea of distributing the lumens widely and the original facebook distribution was actually a success but the software/ecosystem wasn't ready for it at the time so we stopped it. We will do something similar in the future. I don't think any attempt at an internet level protocol like stellar or ripple can be widely adopted with a for profit company owning the majority of the tokens.

> Stellar has always been focused on cross border payments so the IBM announcement isn't a pivot by any means.

> Stellar and ripple are going after two completely different use cases as far as I can tell so I don't understand the continued hostility.