The crazy part is how much XRP is concentrated in the company and its founders:
> XRP, being issued by a company, is less decentralized than many other cryptocurrencies. For instance, Ripple itself holds 61.3 billion XRP, including 55 billion that it keeps in escrow. Only 38.7 billion XRP tokens have been distributed.
> Cofounder and former CEO Chris Larsen, who stepped down in November 2016 and now serves as executive chairman of Ripple, has 5.19 billion XRP in his personal holdings and a 17% stake in the company, according to sources at Ripple. That gives him a net worth of $37.3 billion, using Monday’s exchange rate.
The crazy part is that Ripple is really a total nonsense cryptocurrency it's centralized it as counterparty risk and if any time in the future Banks decide to use it, they will use the tech, not the coin, it's pure madness a lot of people will lose their investment, Ripple it's the "Pet.com" of the cryptocurrency bubble.
And btw the founder that as 17% stake is really a con artist.
I have studied their consensus protocol and it is indeed decentralized.
We are planning to use some of the ideas from it in our network.
As for founders having 20% of a startup company, that's common. Look at Mark Zuckerberg for instance. Why does that make them con artists?
Bitcoin whales and Satoshi control 40% of bitcoins while over 99% of the MONEY contributed its market cap came from regular buyerd who came just recently.
You have 100 USD and 100 XRP in your ripple wallet and the gateway you deposited USD to fund your wallet closes shop, you are now left with the bag in the hand and you must trade 'em for another gateway's IOUs, or try to find someone to buy them from you.
But the currency is not required for banks to actually use the system? I'd be all over this, but it seems banks are only interested in the Ripple tech, and don't require (a lot of) XRP to operate the Ripple tech.
Correct xCurrent doesn't require XRP and just the xRapid product uses XRP to process payments. The thought is that XRP would be a universal currency for the payment processing portion and separated from the xCurrent ledger solution.
As in the video, people would say the same about Ethereum, and yet, Ethereum's community continue to grow and its exchange value continues to grow.
On the other hand, what does Bitcoin have to show? Its community has stagnated and fractured, use-cases have stagnated. As an outsider, it often feels like Bitcoin early adopters are just sitting back and just calling other people stupid.
I've been seeing a lot of news about Ripple taking over my feed, and I'd never heard of it before this week. I'm suspecting this is just a very successful viral marketing campaign applied to the cryptocurrency system as an elaborate pump-and-dump scam.
The idea that Coinbase would do anything at all to increase the number of people trying to use their system to buy or sell anything is laughable. I have been locked out of my coinbase account pending id verification, which I have submitted numerous times incidentally, since December 12 without even a peep of support follow up from Coinbase.
So, for me, seeing stories like this are basically just rage inducing. Coinbase should not offer anything new until they can invest in support infrastructure to close out all of the tickets that have been submitted by a great many people who have been essentially ripped off.
I have given up on the idea that I will ever hear back from Coinbase support at this point. I put money into the system in good faith expecting that, because they were US based, there would be some customer support. I see now it is a swindle. You can play this same trick with just about any valued product: take thousands of orders, collect everyone's money, and then just tell everyone that you are so swamped that technically it will be a very very long time before anyone can get refunds or deliveries.
Oldest trick in the book.
And stories like this where the mainstream Silicon Valley hype machine continues to play along with this ludicrous narrative are absurd and upsetting.
The fact is: Coinbase cannot support transactions or customer issues in a timely way and is making no effort to resolve any of the issues in a timely way after having taken everyone's money.
This article lacks any context whatsoever. XRP is still up from yesterday. Up 100% since last week. Also Coinbase has not said that it will not add XRP, just that they haven't made any decisions yet.
Ripple controls what nodes are used on their network (validators). Can you run a validator? Sure, but note that Ripple, and thus the network, aren't going to use it anyway [validator]:
> At present, Ripple (the company) cannot recommend any validators aside from the 5 core validators run by Ripple
As I mentioned in another comment tree, this is a distributed network, not a decentralized one.
XRP current has no useful use cases. Institutions experimenting with Ripple are not using the public network but their own private RippleNet, which does not use XRP tokens [ripplenet].
* "6.2.3 Team Ownership: The team stake retained by the team is a minority scale."
Currently, 38 of the 100 billion total XRP is in circulation [marketcap]. The developers were "gifted" 80% of all XRP upon its creation [distribution]. Ripple and its owners still hold the majority of all XRP.
Coinbase is covering their ass because of the Bitcoin Cash fiasco. They're basically saying, "We're not adding anything until we add something. And when we do, it will be officially announced."
i.e. they're not just going to suddenly add it and then tell everyone like with BCH.
Will that really make a difference? Some amount of people is still going to know about the announcement in advance. The only difference is that Coinbase might actually have the resources to scale the release this time if they track how big of a deal their announcement is.
The key here is that they linked to their requirements for adding Cryptos, which strongly suggest that XRP will not be added for not being decentralized. This doesn't directly say it has to be fully decentralized though, so it's a bit of interpretation.
Ripple is a great litmus test for people who are FOMO buying.
In this market, when the median top 200 coin under $0.1 went 100x [1], there are easier and "safer"[2] ways to generate returns.
It doesn't even do its job the best. Stellar Lumens (xlm) is a fork and doesn't have the centralized aspect or the 60% supply overhang. Raiblocks (XRB) will eat its lunch in terms of tx speed/fees if the tech doesn't blow up first.
After waiting for over a month now on my Coinbase purchase being stuck in Pending status, with absolutely no response from their Support, I'm getting tired of seeing Coinbase being seen as a leader in the Cryptoverse.
Not that you should have to, but buying on GDAX usually solves any of these problems. Also no transaction fee that way if you don't take the market offers and make your own.
I had to get my bank involved with a purchasing issue from Coinbase. They declared the charges as fraudulent since I couldn't get a response from anyone at Coinbase. This was back in early 2016 before the recent crypto madness too...
I'm pretty close to doing the same thing, but I hestitate because basically that will just mean Coinbase got an interest free loan from me, and the LTC are worth over twice as much now.
Saying "Coinbase sucks but there's nothing to do about it" just reinforces their dominance. Break out of your Stockholm Syndrome and either use Gemini or sue Coinbase.
I would bet that your support ticket will be resolved within 24 hours of filing suit, regardless of what the TOS says. The value of your account is probably far smaller than the legal cost of even filing a motion to dismiss.
LTC. I have had 3 other buys/sells that went through normally, but one buy for approx $1k LTC @ ~$100 is stuck and my support request is sitting with no response. They don't respond to requests and so far haven't even acknowledged a backlog of pending buys, despite daily messages of various delays and outages. Could they be tying up customer funds on purpose?
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoinBase appears to be riddled with similar issues. Good luck. At least you're not the guy whose $800K withdrawal has been pending since 12/22, also with no response from support.
Banks hate cryptocurrency yet Ripple Inc. keeps putting out press releases about working with banks. People read these press releases and think XRP will be the first/only legit cryptocurrency and thus it must be worth more in the future. But they're probably completely wrong.
BTC and ETH both had major scaling issues and transaction fees skyrocketed. Since the semi-centralized nature of Ripple means that transactions are relatively cheap speculators started buying. There are other similar coins that also saw a boost.
Bitcoin stopped going up so people started looking where to park their value. Ripple was next, followed by Lumens. And followed by smaller cap ICOs like TXR.
I would say that the best strategy is lookfor smaller market cap ICOs run by a team that is WELL CONNECTED. The better connected the tram the more chance the coin will explode several times as articles come out about new initiatives.
And just what are the chances of you making 100X? I think people underestimate being able to time the market. This is a small sample size but all my friends who have attempted to day-trade the cryptomarket have not beaten my gains of just hodling.
Why is this on the front page at all? Coinbase has made zero claims about Ripple. The price cannot go up all the time, so a tiny correction is not only normal, but expected.
Meanwhile Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said there are many more that will be added to the platform in 2018, not even a month ago. https://youtu.be/lKviUIeGlgw?t=1m11s
Nobody actually thought they would actually add Ripple. And Ripple dipped with the rest of the altcoin market and has recovered along with it. Once again, bloomberg publishing clickbait in regards to crypto.
Coinbase shouldn't dictate the market. It is the other way around. And sooner or later I hope they will be forced to add it.
Having an argument "Our mission is to create an open financial system for the world" and accepting >only< decentralised cryptos sounds like an oxymoron to me.
In the same way that I'm not forced to invest in XRP or support Ripple, Coinbase has the right to support whatever projects it wants to support. Ripple's project is dangerous to the fundamental mission initiated by Satoshi Nakamoto. They didn't need to elbow into this space and poison the well if all they wanted to do was compete with SWIFT.
is ripple even a blockchain? I thought it was controlled entirely by a private entity? edit: it looks to be a 100% premined cryptocurrency with a blockchain
> XRP, being issued by a company, is less decentralized than many other cryptocurrencies. For instance, Ripple itself holds 61.3 billion XRP, including 55 billion that it keeps in escrow. Only 38.7 billion XRP tokens have been distributed.
> Cofounder and former CEO Chris Larsen, who stepped down in November 2016 and now serves as executive chairman of Ripple, has 5.19 billion XRP in his personal holdings and a 17% stake in the company, according to sources at Ripple. That gives him a net worth of $37.3 billion, using Monday’s exchange rate.