XRP

I never cared about nor followed Ripple much, but their complete dishonesty about the XRP issue is baffling and insulting. Their lies are going to turn me from indifferent to an active enemy of the project / company.

Full disclosure: I am a day one investor in Ripple Labs. I have said many times that you need to diversify bets in the crypto space. I just think we need to look at things correctly.

No one ever got around to solving Ripple's biggest incentive problem: the fact that one group controls *nearly all* of the XRP. What a hot potato that is!! All of the controllers will eventually be cashing out, abandoning the project and fleeing for their lives. In contrast, Federal Reserve Notes were at least a hard fork of the gold blockchain, so to speak. And BTC, each are created as different small accounts (max size ~50) with an unknown owner.

There is no reason for XRP to exist other than to enrich the founders of Ripple.

Big picture: I have nothing against Ripple or XRP. It's not a scam. It may have a killer use case. Just need to acknowledge that more than 50% of XRP is owned by one company, and most trusted nodes are run by that same company, and some assets on ledger can be frozen.

Ripple is a legitimate company; they don’t pretend to be something they’re not, and they’re really good at one thing: moving money fast and cheap. It’s fantastic; it fills a big need for a hedge fund like us to be able to denominate in XRP.

Like are you fucking kidding me? Not a chance in hell that XRP is more decentralized than BTC. But hey, once something is used as a metric, it's no longer a useful measure.

XRP is a security. Ripple is the issuer. Brad Garlinghouse, Chris Larsen, and other Ripple executives are subject to the anti-fraud laws under SEC jurisdiction.

I like to hate on Ripple as much as the next guy, but in the interest of accuracy, Ripple the company can't directly freeze Ripples; they can censor transactions on the validating nodes they control, and gateways can freeze Ripples. That's what happened to Jed [McCaleb] on Bitstamp.

I like to hate on Ripple as much as the next guy, but in the interest of accuracy, Ripple the company can't directly freeze Ripples; they can censor transactions on the validating nodes they control, and gateways can freeze Ripples. That's what happened to Jed [McCaleb] on Bitstamp.

Banks are not going to disappear simply because of Bitcoin and any "revolution" will require 20-30 years to happen. I would argue that protocols like XRP are not an anomaly. They are a reflection of the trade-off between centralization and existing infrastructure. Their perspective is that blockchain is a technology first and foremost and not a wide cloud network like Facebook.

In the case of XRP, we believe that the token holds little utility beyond payment of negligible fees and thus is unlikely to maintain and build value in the long-term. While we expect that XRP tokens will continue to see price spikes as Ripple Inc. makes announcements, we don’t believe that the fundamentals of the protocol will build sustained value for XRP.

Starting to wonder if the XRP community is actually a sophisticated bot network or simply a bunch of 14-year-olds who stole their parents' credit cards.

It's not that I stopped liking Ripple. I didn't agree with how the company was being run and...that they were keeping all the XRP rather than distributing most of it like we had originally planned.

Ripple is far from trust-minimized. As a result, it has high governance costs, including the disputes described here, and poor social scalability.