Most of HN down votes anything about bitcoin and a few HN bitcoin fans down vote anything "negative" about bitcoin and certainly everything involving XRP. So to

Most of HN down votes anything about bitcoin and a few HN bitcoin fans down vote anything "negative" about bitcoin and certainly everything involving XRP. So to no surprise this is being down voted. >No BTC involvement required. Totally correct. Remittance over a bridge currency only make sense under very specific conditions, which include that the input currency and the output currency are different. And a direct exchange is not possible or not cheap. The traditional banking system does this as well, they usually use USD as bridge. To pair every currency with every currency simply isn't feasible and the low volume pairs would have no liquidity anyway. Its basically the same as with goods if you have wood but want metal you use a currency as bridge because there is no market to sell wood for metal. Now if you also have a location difference between the market where you want to sell and the mark where you want to buy then you actually can use the bridge currency to move from one market (location) to another market (location).