9 ms·

Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

78 points by miobrien 9y ago

tristanj 9y ago
A couple other discussions from earlier this week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 (Yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 (Two days ago) I found the top comment in yesterday's thread rather interesting. If there is a hard cap of 100 billion Ripple coins that can exist, and Ripple Labs already owns 60% of them, at today's price of $3.33 that would mean Ripple Labs has $3.33 * 0.60 * 100billion = $200 Billion in assets, making it one of the largest companies in the world. It's complete madness.
- skydv 9y ago
  but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.
  - andymcsherry 9y ago
    $1/year for a billion years isn't worth a billion dollars. It's essentially a perpetuity, which is worth $1 / the prevailing interest rate. If that rate is 5%, you're only worth $20
  - bmking 9y ago
    It depends. Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" and expect the market to absorb it. But currently the 24-hours trading volume is 6.6 billion USD (https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP). A huge part of that may be wash trading due to some zero-fee exchangers. Nevertheless I am speachless how relatively speaking a lot of money is actually being poured into this right now.
    - Anderkent 9y ago
      The market depth is a more interesting metric than volume. As you say wash trades, or just short-term speculative trades, inflate volume without actually impacting the size of the market.
    - shepardrtc 9y ago
      > Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" They can't. They've escrowed that 60 billion away and will release it to institutions at regular intervals. Any XRP that isn't bought will be put back in escrow. The executives that have large amounts of XRP themselves are contractually obligated to not dump it. They can only sell a certain amount per week. I think its like 10,000 or something (but I could be wrong on that).
  - raverbashing 9y ago
    Tech, meet Econ 101
  - mcmacintosh 9y ago
    That's like saying Bezos or Gates aren't really worth ~60B dollars, like the news are repeatedly saying though. Isn't that right? Considering most of their wealth is in stocks.
    - MagnumOpus 9y ago
      It is technically right. However, even in a 100% firesale, they could make - say - $10bn to $20bn, because the fundamentals of their companies' earnings and dividends would entice sufficiently many new investors to step into the market. Cryptocoins have no such fundamental value backstop - someone desperately trying to sell a large fraction of the market cap would drive the price to basically zero in short order.
bekman 9y ago
If this’s not a bubble I don’t know what it’s
- wsc981 9y ago
  Since everybody and their grandmother is telling these days it's a bubble, I've somehow come to the believe that this time it's not a bubble. Why? Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. Perhaps it was 5% - 10%. At least this was what appeared in the news. The big shots at the central banks didn't see this bubble either, for the most part. But now every big banker is saying Bitcoin is a bubble. For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. The majority of people (economists, bankers and the like) that should recognise a bubble were only able to call it a bubble in hindsight. The more I hear this is a bubble, the more of my spare money I will invest into cryptos.
  - kosei 9y ago
    This seems like confirmation bias to me. How many bubbles or fads were called by people that evaporated (beanie babies, troll dolls, etc)?
  - adventured 9y ago
    At the height of the dotcom bubble, people were very widely calling it an insane bubble. I read just about every financial story about it that came out during those ~2.5 years it lasted (the actual bubble was short lived). It was fairly evenly split between two camps, one represented by the bubble pumpers calling it the new economy (or different this time; they had lots of bumper sticker sayings), the other by traditionalists focused on relatively normal valuation metrics. Guess who prevailed. Warren Buffett, as always. Nearly all of the public dotcoms collapsed or were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. Few survived and thrived, Amazon barely made it out alive. Those thousand crypto coins? They will not survive. A few will, and they'll thrive - thrive meaning, they'll be lucky to be worth what they are today, in another ten years.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. During the mortgage crisis, basically every notable economist and economic commentator was calling it a bubble; some had been for several years, and some only very late (but still before it popped), but it absolutely is not the case that the concept was rare my stated. The closest your statement is to truth is that there weren't lots of people accurately predicting the timing of the bubble popping, but that's a different thing than recognizing the bubble. > For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. It's true that he dot-com bubble was much the same as the mortgage bubble, but only in that it equally did not match your “no one was calling it a bubble” description.
noncoml 9y ago
We had three stories about Ripple appearing in front page in 3 days. What’s going on?
- Kiro 9y ago
  Just read the headline of this article and you'll realize why the current Ripple psychosis is newsworthy. What has happened the last week is historical and scary.
  - adventured 9y ago
    It's the signal the mania stage is nearing an end. See: Yasumitsu Shigeta They're playing musical chairs right before the implosion. Ripple might be worth a couple billion dollars as a dangerous speculation. PayPal, an actual, real, live, huge, global, payment & money transfer system, is worth $92 billion. Some people say you can't place a value on something like Ripple. Sure you can, treat it as an actual business, measure its prospects over the next 3, 5, 10 years. What are those business prospects for the next few years? Not much, less than that of Square and Stripe. Ripple is just this bubble's CMGI or Internet Capital Group. Bitcoin is this bubble's Cisco or AOL (if it's lucky). The junk ICOs are DrKoop.com or TheGlobe. There's nothing unique about what's going on, history is rhyming as it so often does. It's a likely indication the global liquidity asset bubble party - spurred on by so many central banks pumping crazy levels of liquidity into the global economy for a decade - is reaching toward a climax, again.
    - tedeh 9y ago
      Can you explain the Yasumitsu Shigeta reference? I tried Googling but I don't get it.
      - stock_toaster 9y ago
        From what I gather, the founder and chairman of Hikari Tsushin Inc. Once among the world's richest people, until Hikari Tsushin lost 99% of its stock value in 2000. EDIT: found this[1] [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/25/internetnews.business https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/25/internetn...
iamleppert 9y ago
The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is. It's completely imaginary, often times irrational and a shared fiction. The fact that we have conventional billionaires at all is almost a ridiculous concept in and of itself, as any amount of tangible work is always done en masse, not by a singular person. Works can be created by individual contributors but it is the mass that gives them value. Put those people on an island and those works become meaningless. In the case of cryptocurrency, the work here is being done, again, by many people. Economics is, as a fundamental matter, the study of choice. People are, for whatever reason, choosing to do both work and ascribe value to these systems, and it just so happens that these systems are designed in such a way to funnel that work into the hands of mostly a few. This is not owing to any revelation or discovery or intellectual pursuit, but represents pure greed and capitalism --- the selfish pursuit of benefit from fellow man. Whoever says bitcoin and the other currencies are some kind of panacea that will free us from the shackles of government fiat, big corporations and stymied control of wealth need only look to stories like these, which, are proof that this is just a different and new kind of master.
- pixie_ 9y ago
  Which one of these properties of cryptocurrency is imaginary? Coins cant be faked or duplicated No one can create them at will They can be transmitted quickly/globally with low fees (excluding bitcoin of course) You can store them yourself, no bank needed Sending huge sums of money is no problem Relatively simple design, 8 page white paper Has worked as designed for almost a decade Seems like crypto has a lot unique intrinsic value that surpasses traditional currencies to date. The only thing imaginary is your imagination. Crypto is very real. Even people on an island would eventually find a common denominator in which to store value which has many of the same properties above.
  - tromp 9y ago
    > No one can create them at will Didn't Ripple Labs create 100 bilion ripple at will?
    - 9y ago
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
This is no different from billionaires that hold massive equity stakes in their own companies, including Zuckerberg. > Yet the fortunes of Mr. McCaleb and Mr. Larsen are not nearly as durable as those of other people on the Forbes list given that the value of virtual currencies fluctuates wildly. If Mr. Larsen wanted to access his wealth by selling Ripple tokens for dollars, it would likely drive down the value of Ripple tokens — and his riches. People keep trying to apply a different higher standard to cryptocurrency in order to prove why it cant function as legacy asset classes. Honestly, I think its because people dont know how the equity/currency/commodity markets work and are synthesizing standards while watching crypto billionaires get minted on the fly to justify their missed opportunities. In Ripple’s case, the founders are probably more liquid than other equity billionaires. Ripple traded 7 billion usd today, Facebook only 2 billion. And I dont even like Ripple, but right now I have to fight ignorance outside of the crypto arena.
- Brede 9y ago
  The difference is very simple. If you buy all ripple tokens in existence, they are useless. If you buy all facebook stocks in existence, you own facebook.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    All ripple accounts require 20 xrp which cannot be moved so this is an impossibility to begin with Xrp holders have some function in the network, I forgot And you could name the price for anyone else that wanted xrp or to use the network Although I would say Ripple’s XRP is not the settlement solution Id be looking for, I wouldnt say owning 99.999% of them makes it worthless Owning all of a commodity doesnt make it worthless, even when that commodity is a unique collection of cryptographic signatures
    - keymone 9y ago
      if i have 20 ripple but can't spend them - how is that different from having 0 ripple?
Ataraxy 9y ago
Whenever I see extremely disproportionate volume coming from Bitthumb I'm immediately skeptical it's anything more than a pump and dump cycle. Same thing happened with BCH among others.
- varren 9y ago
  yeah bithumb is insane. I'm scared to assume how much money involved and why nobody is trying to/cant arbitrage this. It's like complete noncence at this point. Whole different price universe. And i can't belive that it is some random korean dude that can't register on bitfinex or some other exchange and buy the coin he wants with 30-60% discount.
pmontra 9y ago
I just read a critical analysis about Ripple [1] then saw this thread on HN. I quote the conclusion "XRP is 100% premined, Ripple holds 60% of the supply, controls which nodes are selected as “trustworthy” to confirm transactions, while they have paid nothing to create those tokens that people are so willingly buying at $4+ per piece and thereby make the creators insanely rich. Let us call it what it really is, digital fiat, the renewed version of the debt-based traditional fiat system, leveraged by latest technology – which eventually has nothing to do with cryptocurrency whatsoever." [1] https://cryptoyoda1338.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-truth-about-ripple/ https://cryptoyoda1338.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-truth-ab...
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  I should make my own cryptocurrency, generate $60 billion out of thin air.
  - jbob2000 9y ago
    You don't even need to go that far, just generate a bunch of UUIDs and sell them to people.
    - panarky 9y ago
      When you can explain why people trade hard-earned cash for cryptocurrency but would never buy your UUIDs, then you'll understand the flaw in your argument. Hint: It's not because they're stupid or deceived. Go deeper.
      - jbob2000 9y ago
        Follow me on this one. If I hold all my currency in a service like Coinbase, how do I know that I actually bought bitcoins? All I see is a pretty interface that says "you have x bitcoins" and maybe a list of hashes and whatnot. To a non-technical, these hashes and numbers are totally meaningless. As long as everything is done through my service (coinbase, for example) nobody has any idea if there are actually bitcoins behind these numbers or not. You can't hold a bitcoin, I can't ask you to mail me them so I can verify that they exist. The only thing you can do is trust the blockchain, which you definitely need a technical background to understand. So yes, with enough smoke and mirrors, I believe you could setup a service to sell people UUIDs. It hinges on non-technicals using only my service though. Obviously you couldn't do this with a real cryptocurrency, because the blockchain would tell you if the coins actually exist or not.
waytogo 9y ago
Looked into both Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM) and invested more into Stellar because of... - the much better scaling than traditional coins (semi-central structure) - the track record of the founder Jed - the fuller feature set including the creation of new tokens like ETH but easier - the recent announcement like IBMs partnering and stress tests, Kin moving to Stellar, Signal's founder creating his coin on Stellar - Stellar's lower market cap, so there's still room above I think Ripple is also good but has a different focus and since the original founder of Ripple left to Stellar, I am a bit more into Stellar.
- sethgecko 9y ago
  I looked into the top15 currencies by market cap. I decided to stay away from cardano/tron/iota/bitcoin cash/dash/neo. Stellar is my favourite so far other than bitcoin even though I don't 100% understand the consensus algorithm yet.
  - lawn 9y ago
    Why do you lump bitcoin cash with the other pointless coins? It is better at being bitcoin than bitcoin except for speculative purposes (so far).
    - neinnein 9y ago
      Increasing blocksize does not make bcash 'better at being bitcoin'
    - sethgecko 9y ago
      Because I don't find anything that does better than litecoin. Also this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarEszFY1WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarEszFY1WY shows the fundamentally different viewpoints between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. As someone mentions in the video what bitcoin cash is trying to do is implement business logic inside the protocol which is a layer violation.
      - lawn 9y ago
keymone 9y ago
Ripple is not Bitcoin competitor because Ripple is not a cryptocurrency.
teekert 9y ago
Yeah, he's pretty rich... if he cashes all his Ripple at the price point of the current highest bidder. However, said bidder will not want all of it, so some will go at a lower price, and so on. Eventually the price may become extremely low due to the very high supply (which diminishes demand again). I wonder if this is taken into account. All crypto starters are rich in their own coins but they can never cash it in, at least not all at once. Same holds true for "normal" money since the gold standard was left behind of course. Their wealth depends on someone willing to pay a price, she or he is willing to pay said price because she or he expects the next person to pay even more at some point. Classic pyramid. Bad? I don't think so. Heading for an eventual crash? I think it will, at some point. Hopefully I'll get rich before then. What Ripple has going for it is that they may actually succeed at making it a system banks will adopt. If futures become available, insuring parties against fluctuations during transfer, Ripple may have actual value over just the next girl/guy wanting it more than you.
- bemmu 9y ago
  Wanna be billionaire buddies? Issue 1 billion teekertcoins, I'll buy one from you for $1 if you do the same.
  - teekert 9y ago
    Sounds good, Three Commas Club here we come! (Let me first start with a course on constructing Blockchains though... or who cares, lets just use an Excel file for bookkeeping!)
    - cwkoss 9y ago
      Gotta use Google Sheets or it won't be decentralized /s
jasonwilk 9y ago
I'm curious if the venture investors in Ripple (seed, Series A, b, etc) benefit at all from the uptick in XRP. I assume an equity investment did not take the form of coins when those deals were done. Hopefully for those VCs I'm wrong. Anyone have an idea?

78 points by miobrien 9y ago

A couple other discussions from earlier this week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 (Yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 (Two days ago) I found the top comment in yesterday's thread rather interesting. If there is a hard cap of 100 billion Ripple coins that can exist, and Ripple Labs already owns 60% of them, at today's price of $3.33 that would mean Ripple Labs has $3.33 * 0.60 * 100billion = $200 Billion in assets, making it one of the largest companies in the world. It's complete madness.

skydv 9y ago
but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.
- andymcsherry 9y ago
  $1/year for a billion years isn't worth a billion dollars. It's essentially a perpetuity, which is worth $1 / the prevailing interest rate. If that rate is 5%, you're only worth $20
- bmking 9y ago
  It depends. Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" and expect the market to absorb it. But currently the 24-hours trading volume is 6.6 billion USD (https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP). A huge part of that may be wash trading due to some zero-fee exchangers. Nevertheless I am speachless how relatively speaking a lot of money is actually being poured into this right now.
  - Anderkent 9y ago
    The market depth is a more interesting metric than volume. As you say wash trades, or just short-term speculative trades, inflate volume without actually impacting the size of the market.
  - shepardrtc 9y ago
    > Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" They can't. They've escrowed that 60 billion away and will release it to institutions at regular intervals. Any XRP that isn't bought will be put back in escrow. The executives that have large amounts of XRP themselves are contractually obligated to not dump it. They can only sell a certain amount per week. I think its like 10,000 or something (but I could be wrong on that).
- raverbashing 9y ago
  Tech, meet Econ 101
- mcmacintosh 9y ago
  That's like saying Bezos or Gates aren't really worth ~60B dollars, like the news are repeatedly saying though. Isn't that right? Considering most of their wealth is in stocks.
  - MagnumOpus 9y ago
    It is technically right. However, even in a 100% firesale, they could make - say - $10bn to $20bn, because the fundamentals of their companies' earnings and dividends would entice sufficiently many new investors to step into the market. Cryptocoins have no such fundamental value backstop - someone desperately trying to sell a large fraction of the market cap would drive the price to basically zero in short order.

bekman 9y ago

If this’s not a bubble I don’t know what it’s

wsc981 9y ago
Since everybody and their grandmother is telling these days it's a bubble, I've somehow come to the believe that this time it's not a bubble. Why? Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. Perhaps it was 5% - 10%. At least this was what appeared in the news. The big shots at the central banks didn't see this bubble either, for the most part. But now every big banker is saying Bitcoin is a bubble. For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. The majority of people (economists, bankers and the like) that should recognise a bubble were only able to call it a bubble in hindsight. The more I hear this is a bubble, the more of my spare money I will invest into cryptos.
- kosei 9y ago
  This seems like confirmation bias to me. How many bubbles or fads were called by people that evaporated (beanie babies, troll dolls, etc)?
- adventured 9y ago
  At the height of the dotcom bubble, people were very widely calling it an insane bubble. I read just about every financial story about it that came out during those ~2.5 years it lasted (the actual bubble was short lived). It was fairly evenly split between two camps, one represented by the bubble pumpers calling it the new economy (or different this time; they had lots of bumper sticker sayings), the other by traditionalists focused on relatively normal valuation metrics. Guess who prevailed. Warren Buffett, as always. Nearly all of the public dotcoms collapsed or were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. Few survived and thrived, Amazon barely made it out alive. Those thousand crypto coins? They will not survive. A few will, and they'll thrive - thrive meaning, they'll be lucky to be worth what they are today, in another ten years.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. During the mortgage crisis, basically every notable economist and economic commentator was calling it a bubble; some had been for several years, and some only very late (but still before it popped), but it absolutely is not the case that the concept was rare my stated. The closest your statement is to truth is that there weren't lots of people accurately predicting the timing of the bubble popping, but that's a different thing than recognizing the bubble. > For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. It's true that he dot-com bubble was much the same as the mortgage bubble, but only in that it equally did not match your “no one was calling it a bubble” description.

noncoml 9y ago

We had three stories about Ripple appearing in front page in 3 days. What’s going on?

Kiro 9y ago
Just read the headline of this article and you'll realize why the current Ripple psychosis is newsworthy. What has happened the last week is historical and scary.
- adventured 9y ago
  It's the signal the mania stage is nearing an end. See: Yasumitsu Shigeta They're playing musical chairs right before the implosion. Ripple might be worth a couple billion dollars as a dangerous speculation. PayPal, an actual, real, live, huge, global, payment & money transfer system, is worth $92 billion. Some people say you can't place a value on something like Ripple. Sure you can, treat it as an actual business, measure its prospects over the next 3, 5, 10 years. What are those business prospects for the next few years? Not much, less than that of Square and Stripe. Ripple is just this bubble's CMGI or Internet Capital Group. Bitcoin is this bubble's Cisco or AOL (if it's lucky). The junk ICOs are DrKoop.com or TheGlobe. There's nothing unique about what's going on, history is rhyming as it so often does. It's a likely indication the global liquidity asset bubble party - spurred on by so many central banks pumping crazy levels of liquidity into the global economy for a decade - is reaching toward a climax, again.
  - tedeh 9y ago
    Can you explain the Yasumitsu Shigeta reference? I tried Googling but I don't get it.
    - stock_toaster 9y ago
      From what I gather, the founder and chairman of Hikari Tsushin Inc. Once among the world's richest people, until Hikari Tsushin lost 99% of its stock value in 2000. EDIT: found this[1] [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/25/internetnews.business https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/nov/25/internetn...

iamleppert 9y ago

The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is. It's completely imaginary, often times irrational and a shared fiction. The fact that we have conventional billionaires at all is almost a ridiculous concept in and of itself, as any amount of tangible work is always done en masse, not by a singular person. Works can be created by individual contributors but it is the mass that gives them value. Put those people on an island and those works become meaningless. In the case of cryptocurrency, the work here is being done, again, by many people. Economics is, as a fundamental matter, the study of choice. People are, for whatever reason, choosing to do both work and ascribe value to these systems, and it just so happens that these systems are designed in such a way to funnel that work into the hands of mostly a few. This is not owing to any revelation or discovery or intellectual pursuit, but represents pure greed and capitalism --- the selfish pursuit of benefit from fellow man. Whoever says bitcoin and the other currencies are some kind of panacea that will free us from the shackles of government fiat, big corporations and stymied control of wealth need only look to stories like these, which, are proof that this is just a different and new kind of master.

pixie_ 9y ago
Which one of these properties of cryptocurrency is imaginary? Coins cant be faked or duplicated No one can create them at will They can be transmitted quickly/globally with low fees (excluding bitcoin of course) You can store them yourself, no bank needed Sending huge sums of money is no problem Relatively simple design, 8 page white paper Has worked as designed for almost a decade Seems like crypto has a lot unique intrinsic value that surpasses traditional currencies to date. The only thing imaginary is your imagination. Crypto is very real. Even people on an island would eventually find a common denominator in which to store value which has many of the same properties above.
- tromp 9y ago
  > No one can create them at will Didn't Ripple Labs create 100 bilion ripple at will?
  - 9y ago

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

This is no different from billionaires that hold massive equity stakes in their own companies, including Zuckerberg. > Yet the fortunes of Mr. McCaleb and Mr. Larsen are not nearly as durable as those of other people on the Forbes list given that the value of virtual currencies fluctuates wildly. If Mr. Larsen wanted to access his wealth by selling Ripple tokens for dollars, it would likely drive down the value of Ripple tokens — and his riches. People keep trying to apply a different higher standard to cryptocurrency in order to prove why it cant function as legacy asset classes. Honestly, I think its because people dont know how the equity/currency/commodity markets work and are synthesizing standards while watching crypto billionaires get minted on the fly to justify their missed opportunities. In Ripple’s case, the founders are probably more liquid than other equity billionaires. Ripple traded 7 billion usd today, Facebook only 2 billion. And I dont even like Ripple, but right now I have to fight ignorance outside of the crypto arena.

Brede 9y ago
The difference is very simple. If you buy all ripple tokens in existence, they are useless. If you buy all facebook stocks in existence, you own facebook.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  All ripple accounts require 20 xrp which cannot be moved so this is an impossibility to begin with Xrp holders have some function in the network, I forgot And you could name the price for anyone else that wanted xrp or to use the network Although I would say Ripple’s XRP is not the settlement solution Id be looking for, I wouldnt say owning 99.999% of them makes it worthless Owning all of a commodity doesnt make it worthless, even when that commodity is a unique collection of cryptographic signatures
  - keymone 9y ago
    if i have 20 ripple but can't spend them - how is that different from having 0 ripple?

Ataraxy 9y ago

Whenever I see extremely disproportionate volume coming from Bitthumb I'm immediately skeptical it's anything more than a pump and dump cycle. Same thing happened with BCH among others.

varren 9y ago
yeah bithumb is insane. I'm scared to assume how much money involved and why nobody is trying to/cant arbitrage this. It's like complete noncence at this point. Whole different price universe. And i can't belive that it is some random korean dude that can't register on bitfinex or some other exchange and buy the coin he wants with 30-60% discount.

pmontra 9y ago

I just read a critical analysis about Ripple [1] then saw this thread on HN. I quote the conclusion "XRP is 100% premined, Ripple holds 60% of the supply, controls which nodes are selected as “trustworthy” to confirm transactions, while they have paid nothing to create those tokens that people are so willingly buying at $4+ per piece and thereby make the creators insanely rich. Let us call it what it really is, digital fiat, the renewed version of the debt-based traditional fiat system, leveraged by latest technology – which eventually has nothing to do with cryptocurrency whatsoever." [1] https://cryptoyoda1338.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-truth-about-ripple/ https://cryptoyoda1338.wordpress.com/2018/01/04/the-truth-ab...

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I should make my own cryptocurrency, generate $60 billion out of thin air.
- jbob2000 9y ago
  You don't even need to go that far, just generate a bunch of UUIDs and sell them to people.
  - panarky 9y ago
    When you can explain why people trade hard-earned cash for cryptocurrency but would never buy your UUIDs, then you'll understand the flaw in your argument. Hint: It's not because they're stupid or deceived. Go deeper.
    - jbob2000 9y ago
      Follow me on this one. If I hold all my currency in a service like Coinbase, how do I know that I actually bought bitcoins? All I see is a pretty interface that says "you have x bitcoins" and maybe a list of hashes and whatnot. To a non-technical, these hashes and numbers are totally meaningless. As long as everything is done through my service (coinbase, for example) nobody has any idea if there are actually bitcoins behind these numbers or not. You can't hold a bitcoin, I can't ask you to mail me them so I can verify that they exist. The only thing you can do is trust the blockchain, which you definitely need a technical background to understand. So yes, with enough smoke and mirrors, I believe you could setup a service to sell people UUIDs. It hinges on non-technicals using only my service though. Obviously you couldn't do this with a real cryptocurrency, because the blockchain would tell you if the coins actually exist or not.

waytogo 9y ago

Looked into both Ripple (XRP) and Stellar (XLM) and invested more into Stellar because of... - the much better scaling than traditional coins (semi-central structure) - the track record of the founder Jed - the fuller feature set including the creation of new tokens like ETH but easier - the recent announcement like IBMs partnering and stress tests, Kin moving to Stellar, Signal's founder creating his coin on Stellar - Stellar's lower market cap, so there's still room above I think Ripple is also good but has a different focus and since the original founder of Ripple left to Stellar, I am a bit more into Stellar.

sethgecko 9y ago
I looked into the top15 currencies by market cap. I decided to stay away from cardano/tron/iota/bitcoin cash/dash/neo. Stellar is my favourite so far other than bitcoin even though I don't 100% understand the consensus algorithm yet.
- lawn 9y ago
  Why do you lump bitcoin cash with the other pointless coins? It is better at being bitcoin than bitcoin except for speculative purposes (so far).
  - neinnein 9y ago
    Increasing blocksize does not make bcash 'better at being bitcoin'
  - sethgecko 9y ago
    Because I don't find anything that does better than litecoin. Also this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarEszFY1WY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarEszFY1WY shows the fundamentally different viewpoints between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. As someone mentions in the video what bitcoin cash is trying to do is implement business logic inside the protocol which is a layer violation.
    - lawn 9y ago

keymone 9y ago

Ripple is not Bitcoin competitor because Ripple is not a cryptocurrency.

teekert 9y ago

Yeah, he's pretty rich... if he cashes all his Ripple at the price point of the current highest bidder. However, said bidder will not want all of it, so some will go at a lower price, and so on. Eventually the price may become extremely low due to the very high supply (which diminishes demand again). I wonder if this is taken into account. All crypto starters are rich in their own coins but they can never cash it in, at least not all at once. Same holds true for "normal" money since the gold standard was left behind of course. Their wealth depends on someone willing to pay a price, she or he is willing to pay said price because she or he expects the next person to pay even more at some point. Classic pyramid. Bad? I don't think so. Heading for an eventual crash? I think it will, at some point. Hopefully I'll get rich before then. What Ripple has going for it is that they may actually succeed at making it a system banks will adopt. If futures become available, insuring parties against fluctuations during transfer, Ripple may have actual value over just the next girl/guy wanting it more than you.

bemmu 9y ago
Wanna be billionaire buddies? Issue 1 billion teekertcoins, I'll buy one from you for $1 if you do the same.
- teekert 9y ago
  Sounds good, Three Commas Club here we come! (Let me first start with a course on constructing Blockchains though... or who cares, lets just use an Excel file for bookkeeping!)
  - cwkoss 9y ago
    Gotta use Google Sheets or it won't be decentralized /s

jasonwilk 9y ago

I'm curious if the venture investors in Ripple (seed, Series A, b, etc) benefit at all from the uptick in XRP. I assume an equity investment did not take the form of coins when those deals were done. Hopefully for those VCs I'm wrong. Anyone have an idea?