Alts are mooning, but not everything is positive
You, as me, and many others that believe in what crypto and the blockchain's purpose really is, we are very happy these days that our bags of trusted investments are making a good ROI and more and more people are hopping on the bandwagon, but I believe we have a wolf disguised as a sheep among us. That wolf is called Ripple.
Getting the facts. And the Problems.
Fact #1 : Ripple is a real-time gross settlement system, currency exchange and remittance network by Ripple Labs.That comes from Wikipedia and in a nutshell it says that Ripple (XRP), is not a cryptocurrency itself, it is a means of value exchange on top of a blockchain technology. What else is a means of value exchange? wink wink FIAT. The good ol' mighty US Dollar on top of the banking systems.
The Ripple Transaction protocol is built upon a distributed open source Internet protocol, consensus ledger and uses the native “cryptocurrency” XRP.
Fact #2: The entire Ripple supply was created at launch. Most of us have a pretty specific term about this process. Premine. Yes, 100 billion XRP was premined when the business launched. There was zero effort put into building that supply. That is even worse than fiat as the XRP tokens have absolutely no value vs the paper/metal fiat is built form.
The problem here is that Ripple Labs is selling very expensive air to you and everyone else.
Fact #3: 60% of the total supply of Ripple (XRP) is owned and controlled by the Ripple Labs organization.
Do you really want to hold a token where at any moment, Ripple Labs can flood the markets with more tokens than anyone owns? What do you think such a token dump would do to the value of your XRP holdings? What is the risk you are taking here?
Fact #4: The Ripple network does not have miners or a mining process for the transactions it processes. The entire network is powered by a range of "certified" computers.
Guess who certifies them. Also who owns them.
This is the biggest problem of all because even if you choose to trust Ripple Labs and believe in them, they control your XRP too. Nobody should be surprised if they can't move their XRP. If Ripple Labs wants to drop the banhammer on you, you won't be able to sell your XRP or transfer it anywhere because your transactions would get refused by the network, which they fully control!!
So what's the main problem
The purpose of cryptocurrency, and Bitcoin if we want to single out the one that started the movement, is a trustless decentralized system that allows anyone to own and move value, anytime and anywhere.
Satoshi designed the first blockchain to allow anyone to be a part of the network and mine/sign transactions and to allow anyone to safely be the owners of their digital assets through each address's Private key and to allow anyone to transfer their Bitcoins at any time they desire to do it. This is the key of what we all support and stand by. We want to be the only owners of our values without the risk of anyone taking them from us. We want to be able to transfer our values should we choose so at any moment. A real decentralized trustless system should allow that. Ripple most certainly does not.
I don't hold any Ripple. I did until a while ago when I fully grasped what it was and sold it all in a heartbeat, but if you do hold any or if you plan to invest and buy/hold any, please let me tell you this:
By fueling the Ripple train you are a participant in what they build.
And what they build is the same enslaving banking system that controls the funds of everyone holding their values with them. All the efforts of the crypto movement to free value ownership will be gone if we fool ourselves thinking that XRP and the likes, is the solution.
I know there is a huge money mirage and whenever anyone thinks about crypto nowadays all they think about is the quick ROI and how fast it's rising and how much money they can make out of it.
Crypto is more than that. It stands to create the freedom we have forgotten we are entitled to.
I hope everyone thinks about this really well. For the past couple years we have been on the verge of creating something extraordinary and revolutionize the way our assets belong to us. Let's not miss this goal for us and future generations by resorting to the same imprisoned systems, just for the sake of a quick buck.
Thank you for stopping by and be safe out there.