Why did I get into crypto investing?

To make money. My story begins way back in when I first read about Bitcoin in Wired magazine. It was a novelty, and I ignored it thinking that it was a passing fad; intrigued by its ingenuity, but skeptical because I had no idea what the future would bring. At the time, the price of Bitcoin was under one cent.

When Bitcoin rose in price and demand exploded, the missed opportunity hurt in a very visceral way for me, and I vowed to attempt to capitalize on the “next Bitcoin.”

Enter XRP

It was then 2013, and I researched many different crypto-currency options before discovering the one digital asset that seemed to have everything I was looking for:

True Innovation . XRP was not a Bitcoin knock-off. It can transform one currency into any other currency, and that includes other crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin.

. XRP was not a Bitcoin knock-off. It can transform one currency into any other currency, and that includes other crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin. Transaction Throughput. Bitcoin can only handle ~6 transactions per second. XRP over Ripple’s payment channels can handle 50,000 transactions per second. 1

Bitcoin can only handle ~6 transactions per second. XRP over Ripple’s payment channels can handle 50,000 transactions per second. Fast Settlement. Bitcoin takes somewhere between 3-6 hours to achieve settlement with confirmations. Ripple does it in under 4 seconds. 2

Bitcoin takes somewhere between 3-6 hours to achieve settlement with confirmations. Ripple does it in under 4 seconds. Enablement of Existing Financial Systems. Ripple has made it their central goal to help banks do payments and international settlement faster and for immense cost savings. 3 The Bitcoin Foundation’s manifesto thumbs its nose at governmental authority over individuals. 4

The Use Case for XRP

The existing system for international payments across borders is a cobbled-together network of systems that do not work well with each other, and sometimes can take days. It’s well known that, depending on the country, it is sometimes faster to carry cash with you on a plane than it is to try to send it electronically through banks. 5

Not only that, there are very substantial fees to international money transfers, and some banks are not able to inform the customer about the exact cost of the fees up front, because those will only ultimately be known when the exchange has completed in the other country. This system is overdue for an innovative new system that can lower risk and offer fast, reliable payments that settle in seconds across borders.

Ripple has the technology to make this happen. Their software is already being used in approximately 50 banks worldwide, and 15 of those banks are in the list of the top 50 banks worldwide. 6 If you want to transfer US dollars to Japanese Yen, you can do it in four seconds over Ripple using XRP as a bridge asset. Not only that, but the network can scale to up to 50,000 transactions per second. Ripple technology is starting to be used as the fastest and lowest cost system for international payment settlement.

And that’s good for your XRP investment!

But it’s about more than just making you wealthy based on the value of the digital asset that’s used as Ripple’s bridge currency. It’s about the network effect of making what used to be a slow, snail-paced transaction as fast as electrons can move. We know that lowering the cost of a transaction to almost zero and making it faster will have dramatic effects on commerce. But to really understand what can happen, we have to look at the history of the internet itself, and specifically email.

That’s right, email.

The Network Effect

“In the United States, the use of first class mail peaked in 2001, when 103.7 billion pieces of mail were sent in a single year.

By contrast in 2014, global email traffic averaged more than 190 billion individual emails, every day of that year.” 7

Note that this is an imperfect example because we don’t have worldwide mail numbers, but it serves to overwhelmingly demonstrate the point. The same principles that resulted in this effect should hold true for transfers of money across borders:

A dramatic reduction in price. For mail, it took the price of a stamp to send a communication. Email is… free? International transfers of money sometimes eat up a significant portion of the underlying amount being transferred. The cost to use the Ripple network is the network fee, currently set to 0.00001 XRP, which equates to roughly $.00025. That’s 2.5 hundredths of a cent per transaction! 8 A dramatic increase in speed. Mail used to take a minimum of one or two days. Email is as fast as the internet. International settlement of funds currently stops and starts with bankers’ hours in different time zones, taking hours or days. Ripple can do it as fast as the internet.

Sound familiar? The same effect that resulted from email can happen for international value transfer as well!

What Ripple is doing is not just good for XRP price and its business… it has the potential to supercharge payment settlement across borders for the entire world.

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