With bitcoin, the actors are whoever has the best price on power and the best ASICs. There's no way to know whether or not such actors will collude and, today, they're all controlled by the government of China should it choose to exercise such control. By contrast, Ripple's consensus algorithm is not inherently centralizing in this way. It won't decentralize itself, but it's possible for it to be, and remain, truly decentralized. Ripple is committed to making this happen and has absolutely no incentive not to make it happen.

I don't hate on bitcoin security. I just have a realistic, rather than a naive, view of what it can, and has, accomplished. If you don't realistically see the weaknesses of one scheme, you can't rationally compare it to another.

The problem with bitcoin is that the stakeholders are chosen by external, inherently centralizing, factors. And worse, the stakeholders have a strong incentive to see the transaction fees be high. This is not by any stretch a fatal flaw, and bitcoin would probably have already gotten past it if people were honest about it. It just shows that the naive view that mining is inherently decentralizing and governance will take care of itself through everyone acting selfishly, doesn't always work out as well as you might hope.

I'm still very bullish on bitcoin and expect it to be the dominant cryptocurrency for some time, maybe forever. But it will always have poor censorship resistance due to its reliance on PoW -- unless that reliance changes.