I really don't like many people, they bore me to tears, or they say stupid shit that blows my mind, or they're blatantly lying for whatever agenda they're pursuing. I just unapologetically ignore them when they try to talk to me. In fact I'm so obnoxious that someone once stuck a piece of paper on my back that says, "I'm an asshole". So I left it. Can't argue with facts.

Facts should be at the core of every decision you ever make in life, but getting to those facts seems to be an incredible challenge, thus I thought I should write a starting-point piece catering to the next wave of crypto investors that are wandering blindly into this cesspool of cryptocurrencies.

A lot of you are here because you've heard anecdotal recounts of massive earnings for early adopters, or because you've been hearing that the crypto bear market of the past two years may be coming to an end, or that ceaseless Bitcoin propaganda engine has finally made its way into your sphere of awareness and you've fallen for the songs of its Sirens.

Stop.

This is a very dangerous place. It's largely unregulated, brimming with high-profile con artists, bursting with fake news, and the technology is VERY complicated. Because of this, you'll be bombarded with VERY LOUD propaganda from fascist 'maximalists' (Bitcoin maxis being the most prevalent and venomous) that play on your emotions and sense of loyalty, all sides overwhelming you with the mental tug-of-war that leads you down the inevitable path of exasperation and eventually you'll just hard-line commit to whatever your impulse choice was, and stick to it no matter what.

I get it. Who can you trust? How can you makes sense out of so much nonsense? Who has time to try to wade through so much information to finally arrive at a level of competency that you can make rational decisions?

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't want you to trust me implicitly either, that's not my goal. I just want to show you a few key things that are very important to understand so you don't fall into the same traps that all newcomers do.

Let's first talk about a coin's 'value' versus 'price'. Two seemingly similar terms, and indeed they are supposed to be related, but here's the definitions:

Value - If everyone that needed this coin to perform a function for them (now and INTO THE FUTURE), all got together and started using it for utility purposes (not speculation, big difference), and all speculators stopped trading it, meaning only utility users bought and sold it. How much would it be worth? It's an impossible number to calculate in reality because of the number of parameters involved, but it's no less real than gravity that you can't see either, but you can feel each and every atom on this planet, aggregating in their pull on you. Likewise, a coin's true 'Value' forms the 'gravity' that influences the 'Price', like the Earth compels the Moon.

Price - This is what we see on the exchanges, and it's a combination of present-day utility demand, with speculators trying to pin down what the value could be, further combined with the nefarious forces of massive manipulation by whales. Please read this if you don't quite understand what a whale is. Very important to understand whales.

At this time in the evolution of cryptocurrencies, there is still very little actual real-world adoption. Why? Because most of the technologies are so obtuse to existing legacy systems, that it takes a major multi-year overhaul to start incorporating this new tech, and even years to build up the motivation to do so. That's not to say it isn't happening, it is, but it's just beginning, and soon enough it will exponentiate in ubiquity, as the Internet did during its first 20 years.

That said, if we were to break down the influencing factors of today's 'prices' for cryptocurrencies into a pie chart, we'd see a tiny grandma-sized sliver allocated to actual real-world 'utility', a lean but tasty slice going to 'speculation', and the lion's-share of the price going to the fat bastard whale manipulation.

The biggest trap that new crypto people fall into is believing the price. Using the 'price' of crypto as some form of validation or expression of a coin's 'value', but this just isn't the case. The prices of virtually all the coins move in lockstep, completely irrespective of the individual coins' virtues.

I ask you, does it make sense that every time Bitcoin goes up in value, or goes down in value, that all the other coins do? What possible logical reason could there be for that? All the investors doing exactly the same thing at the same time? That's ridiculous. How could anybody watching Dogecoin/XRP pairs be influenced by what Bitcoin is doing?

No, the answer is quite simple. Hedge funds and other whales have hundreds of millions of dollars into every exchange, virtually every pair, and when they want to stimulate buying and selling, they simply instruct their bots to buy or sell in every pair, rocking the markets, and tapping all that spread-out liquidity.

But the price is going up, it must mean that coin has more 'value'!

Don't be fooled. The hype surrounding cryptocurrency is far greater than the comprehension of it, and so when people enter into the markets, they aren't buying into what they believe is solid tech, they are buying into the propaganda, they are buying into false-price pumps.

They are the impatient enriching the patient..

Let that sink in. If you come in blind with a raging hard-on, jumping on the everything that moves, you end up with crypto-herpes. Every time.

This is why understanding 'value' versus the heavily manipulated 'price' is so important. Value is the 'gravity' that pulls the price into orbit. The only way to invest in crypto is to have a way to determine a coin's 'value', and not pay attention to the price, because the price is mostly unpredictable and meaningless. Until the day that utility demand starts exerting its force upon the markets and can overwhelm the whale manipulation forces, price is effectively a myth.

This also means that until whales are subdued from being the dominant force behind the price, Technical Analysis (TA) predictive-indicator charting is entirely worthless, and I mean worthless. You might as well ask your dog what happens next in crypto. Don't believe in the crystal ball these charlatans try to justify with the 1 in 10 correct calls they make. If it costs you $10 in bad bets to make $1 on good bets, it's not working.

So how do we determine the value of a crypto? Very difficult, at least in terms of choosing a number to quantify it. What is easy however, is taking a relativistic approach, and by this I mean, we can easily show how some cryptos have more value than others. The first requirement to doing this properly is:

Ignoring the price.

That's right, if you can't get past the fact that the price is 100% manipulated at this time and it means absolutely NOTHING, then you might as well just head to Vegas and start gambling. Because if you're going to measure, justify, react to, or promote a coin by its price, then you just don't get it and you'll be yet another sheeple pouring your money into the pockets of the whales.

I know it's hard to fathom, and sounds tin-hat conspiracy-theory'ish, but it's really not hard to believe if you watch how the markets move, how they completely disrespect good or bad news for the most part, how they randomly surge in short intervals. You really have to let go of the price as having any meaning. If you can't, do this, stop reading, nothing else in this blog will have any relevance to you. Go have fun throwing your money away.

For those of you remaining, let's talk more about value. The safest game to play is to invest for value not price, the Warren Buffet strategy. It's a long multi-year play, full of ups and downs, but trust in the gravity to do its thing over time and you'll have made your money.

Garbage coins

I'm going to pick on Bitcoin as usual, because it's the clear winner in terms of both manipulated price and complete lack of value. It's literally a case study in Ponzi dynamics, replete with Peters and Pauls, idealistic propaganda with virtually no delivery on promises, yet, it requires an ever-increasing price if it's to survive; the very definition of unsustainable.

I've tore Bitcoin to pieces multiple times here, here, and here, so I won't repeat the specifics, but with high-profile Bitcoin-pumpers jumping ship, this should be a clear-sign that the game has run its course.

Ignoring the prices then, how do we identify a coin with real significant value? As I said before, 'value' is determined by the people that do or will 'use' that crypto for a utility purpose. That means we need to look at coins that are being used or will eventually have this utility.

Now it's easy to look at each coin's whitepaper and read the very long list of promises that it hopes to deliver, but even Bitcoin promised a pile of stuff, and couldn't deliver on any of it, not one. So, a coin's whitepaper is just a bunch of fluff unless they get some real-world traction. Not a good way to determine value.

What IS a fantastic way to determine value is CURRENT real-world utility, that can also serve as a credible indicator of whether it will live up to its whitepaper promises in the future. By this I mean, which coins are actually out there in the real world, making a difference for the people using them. Again, be very conscious to disregard all speculative and manipulative forces, we're ONLY talking about actually using these coins for utility purposes.

It can be argued that Ethereum has significant utility, and their coin ETH's deep integration into everything Ethereum does, makes it a great utility coin, far more valuable than Bitcoin's worthless coin that can't do anything. See what I did there? I ranked ETH above Bitcoin, because its value is greater, even though the prices would lie to you and try to convince you of the opposite.

This is so important to understand, value is the gravity center, gently but relentlessly pulling the price towards it, either up or down depending on where the actual value is relative to the price. The gravity center for Bitcoin, for example, is located nearly at zero, because it truly has no value. The price doesn't reflect that because speculators are so confused by the optimistic Bitcoin propaganda campaigns, the widespread promulgation and seemingly deep integration into everything (except you still can't buy a coffee with it 10 years on), that it's easy for the whales to sustain a fake price, literally, a Ponzi. The whales desperately push and pull on the price to try to oppose the value gravity, but any attempt to defy gravity COSTS MONEY, either by the sucker investors continuing to finance the Ponzi, or out of the whales' pockets. Let me say this again:

Defying Value Gravity Costs Money!

If something costs money, money will eventually run out. If the temperature outside is 0 degrees, it costs money to heat your home. When the money runs out, what do you think the temperature inside your home will drop to? If you are driving at 80 mph, you will eventually run out of gas and stop. If you are deep in a cave with a flashlight, you'll eventually go dark when the batteries run out.

Anything that takes resources to sustain, will eventually consume all those resources and fail. Therefore, if the gravity of Bitcoin is near zero, and it costs whales a ton of money to continue the charade of it being so valuable, they will eventually have to let it go, like every plane defies gravity till it runs out of fuel.

Ethereum's value may actually be somewhat represented in the markets simply because it has real-world utility contributing to the demand for it. It's still largely manipulated, but the value gravity is relatively significant. It may be more or less than the price, but certainly it's much more than Bitcoin's zero value. If the value is more than the current price, then that means the price will naturally 'gravitate' towards the value, because, again, it costs money to defy gravity.

XRP

Surely you've heard of the third-ranked coin, XRP, by now, perhaps still referring to the coin as 'Ripple'. It's ok, there's a tight connection between XRP and the company that promotes it, Ripple Inc. XRP has to be the most maligned and unjustly misrepresented coin ever. Man alive, if you ever want a case-study for the dynamics of fake news and psychological manipulation to try to demonize a coin, XRP is the most beat-up coin you'll ever read about.

And why is that? I'll put it in a nutshell for you, it's got incredible value, and because of this, it stands to threaten every other lower-value coin's existence. Crypto is still a very nascent primordial ecosystem so technology advances are frequent and dramatic. When XRP came out, it was so far evolved, that most people couldn't even grasp how it works, and because of this, it became quite easy to spin lies about it, counting on the fact that not many people could figure out the truth.

Why is XRP so valuable?

Most people limit their 'value' assessment at the virtues of a coin, completely ignoring 'use case'. It's easy to say that XRP is monstrously faster than Bitcoin, or that it scales a thousand times more, or that it's 1000 time cheaper than Bitcoin, and yes, those are all fantastic selling points, but at the same time, they become quickly-deprecated selling points should another coin come with even more radical specs. It would seem that XRP is just as exposed to obsolescence as XRP rendered Bitcoin, no?

No.

Value of a coin goes FAR beyond its simple specs. The single most important aspect behind a coin's value, is 'adoption'. Put another way, are people/companies actually 'using' that coin for utility. It means absolutely fuck all if some other coin does 15 billion transactions per second for free, if nobody's using it. Theory isn't value, real-world utility is. Remember, value comes from those that want to use it, not because of its specs. Sure, a rocket is faster than a Lambo, but if you can't use the rocket because you don't have a spaceport, are you just going to stay home? No, you're going ballin' in the Lambo.

Theory, doesn't add value. Delivery does.

This all means that there are two parts to a coin having real-world utility: technical capability, and integration. We already know that XRP is orders of magnitude more technically superior than Bitcoin but that alone doesn't give it more value, it's how XRP is adopted/used/integrated that completes the value equation.

Enter Ripple

Ripple is the company behind the proliferation of XRP. Holy shit does Ripple ever get a beat-down from the fanatical nut-jobs out there in the crypto space. Sooo many agenda-laden lies and misdirections that nobody could possibly blame you for also having a negative sentiment towards them, even if you can't put your finger on why. It's ok, I'll get to the negative propaganda aspect in a bit, but please defer your apprehension until the end of this blog, you'll be glad you did.

Ripple provides the 'integration' aspect to XRP's value. By this I mean that Ripple is baking XRP right into their software products that they sell to banks and other financial institutions. They have a product called RippleNet, within which some of the tools utilize XRP to facilitate cross-border payments for their customers. This product is a direct competitor to SWIFT, which is a massive multi-bank consortium that sends..

let me stage this properly...

FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS!!!

hang on, there's more....

A DAAAAAYYYY!!!!

...

Sorry, I passed out.

Ripple's goal is to erode SWIFT's monopoly on global payment flows, and instead send 'some' of those lesser-efficient flows through RippleNet, and gradually increase the utilization of XRP to facilitate those flows. Ripple's advantage is cheaper faster payments, and elimination of nostro/vostro holdings when XRP is used. Banks can save tons of money.

It's a long process to finally get fully adopted by the banks, having to persevere through regulatory headwinds, slow-moving evolution, and poor industry comprehension of the technology, but Ripple's ceaseless market penetration is exponentiating, and the network effect is kicking in, and once Bank A sees RippleNet-enabled Bank B's better bottom line, they'll be a lot more interested. What starts as curious interest in RippleNet, will eventually become mandatory to survive.

Would Ripple switch to using a future more performant coin instead of XRP?

This is, again, myopically only looking at the performance of a coin as the single determiner of value. What contributes to XRP's value, in fact most of its value, is BECAUSE it is being used in RippleNet. Ripple also holds a large pile of XRP, so their goal is to drive as much value into XRP as possible. Switching to a different coin would just be losing all the value they worked so hard to pump into XRP. Why would they do that?

Converting RippleNet to use a more performant coin is splitting hairs in the big picture, because XRP is already super-performant for this use case. Shaving another second off the transaction time, or reducing the fee by another 100th of a cent, isn't going to make a difference to the customers. What Ripple's customers care about is how RippleNet is making their business run smoothly. They are not thinking about XRP, they're thinking about how RippleNet is increasing their profit.

By embedding XRP into their products, Ripple has created incredible utility for XRP, and this dramatically increases its value.

If XRP's value is so high, why doesn't its gravity pull up the price to match?

..Because RippleNet is a brand new product that is just starting to take hold, so the RippleNet XRP flows are just beginning and really aren't significant yet compared to all the other ledger activity. We are still firmly in the grips of the market whales.

MoneyGram is the first large RippleNet customer that is starting to leverage XRP in a big way, because it saves them money! They have consistently set new daily records for XRP usage, and continue to expand into other RippleNet corridors. First it was remittances to Mexico, then the Philippines, and more to come in 2020 as RippleNet and its ODL corridor global expansion explodes.

This will be an exponentiating process, and eventually the competition will see the savings MoneyGram is achieving, and they too will want a piece of the action. That's when the XRP value gravity will start to take hold, when these XRP flows start to take precedence over the bastard whales' fuckery.

This, my friends, is how value is defined. Warren Buffet is one of the richest people in the world from the simple ability to recognize when the stock price doesn't reflect a company's value. Likewise, the whales are doing us a massive favor in obscuring the value of XRP by conflating it with every other crypto.

No other crypto has a world-class fintech company that:

Is so dedicated to driving value into it

Is building a global infrastructure around it,

Has REMOTELY the number of financial partnerships

Has Credibility in the eyes of the IMF and central banks around the world

Procures incredible top industry talent employees, including former SEC and SWIFT employees

This is the real deal! Ripple, a MASSIVE $10-billion dollar company, 100% dedicated to to making XRP more valuable??... I need to sit.

There's not even a close second place. Most crypto projects are 4 people in a garage trying to push their forked variation of a blockchain as some kind of innovation with no targeted use-case or turnkey product integration. Meanwhile Ripple's 400-plus employee, multi-country enterprise is expanding at breakneck pace, signing multiple customers a week, and building the Internet-of-Value that's going to define commerce for the next 100 years.

Who do you want working for your crypto value? A company like Ripple that just as badly wants to see XRP's price appreciate? Or some mystery guy named Satoshi that disappeared with a million Bitcoins. Or how about two super billionaire douchebag twins that refuse to acknowledge the proven technical shortcomings of Bitcoin?

Don't ask me what the price of XRP should be, I don't know. What I do know is that XRP has far more value than Bitcoin, and given that Ethereum currently exhibits many issues that it's trying hard to evolve away from, I'd say XRP is far more valuable than Ethereum as well. Again, we're talking VALUE, not PRICE. I'm just identifying the relative positions of their value gravity.

Bitcoin's gravity is at zero because it has no utility. Ethereum's value gravity is somewhere, but it's hard to know with all the manipulation. XRP's value gravity however, is most certainly more than Bitcoin's or today's Ethereum. Just goes to show just how screwed up the prices are.

FUD

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. It's such a prolific psychological warfare tactic that it's got its own acronym. FUD is nothing more than lies presented as seemingly implicit facts in order to confuse investors so they don't give their money to the competition. Nothing more. Nothing less. Because the Bitcoin incumbents have so much Bitcoin left that they need to unload, they're doing their best to keep the anti-Ripple FUD alive, saying whatever it takes to keep new investors away from XRP. It's a massive campaign that seems to come from every corner.

Here's the most common FUD that circulates, and I've provided links to my other blog entries that inoculate the lies head on.

Everyone tells me Ripple is centralized

The XRP network architecture started centralized, just like Bitcoin started centralized. Because of the way that XRP decentralizes, it took a while longer than Bitcoin did to fully decentralize, but XRP is now completely decentralized, and not within Ripple's ability to coerce, censor, or modify. In fact, if Ripple went out of business today, XRP will continue unabated. This is a fact.

Then there's the malicious attempt to smear the confidence-shaking negative word 'centralized' to describe Ripple's XRP holdings instead of using the proper term, 'concentrated', intentionally commingling terms to sow confusion and unwarranted concern. All companies have assets. You wouldn't refer to Microsoft's assets as centralized, or Apple's, or Warren Buffet's.. Why should Ripple be held to a different standard simply because their assets are crypto? It's senseless and a sensationalist attempt to foment bad connotations onto an innocent fact.

It's a bit outdated (still says XRP is not quite decentralized, but it is now), but this blog smashes the centralized FUD to bits.

Ripple/XRP is a scamcoin/Banker's coin? Why does everyone say that if it's not true?

Not everyone, just the very loud Bitcoin maxis and mindless regurgitators, who still own a lot of Bitcoins, and they are lying to scare you away from XRP and to keep you coming for more Bitcoins so they can continue to cash out at your expense. Don't be a Ponzi victim. Read this blog

Another important point is that XRP isn't designed for any specific purpose, other than value transfer. To say it's a banker's coin, confuses the agnostic coin with the Bank-centric Ripple. But XRP can be used in ANY use-case, including all those that Bitcoin alleges to. It's just a coin, nothing 'bankish' about it. You can hold it anonymously in your own wallet, nobody can take it away from you, etc. There will be a ton of companies using XRP for their own purposes that have zero to do with Ripple or its products, e.g. Coil.

But banks are not using XRP

You're jumping to the finish line. It's a process of growth. Please read this

Is XRP a security?

Absolutely 100% not. Recent legislation introduced to the US House of Representatives would consider XRP to be a crypto-commodity, very clearly distinguished from the other category of a crypto-security.

And there's also my arguments here

I've heard that RippleNet doesn't require XRP to be used. Why would the banks use it then?

This argument stems from the complete ignorance of how RippleNet works. I address this here, and if you want to get into the details of how XRP works in RippleNet's ODL (formerly xRapid), give this a read.

Can't Ripple just print more coins whenever they want?

No, Ripple has no control over the state of XRP. The only possible way for there to be more/less coins created is if all the validators decide to do so, independently of Ripple. The same applies to any coin, if a majority agree to a change, anything can happen. This is what happened to Ethereum when they reversed some funds a few years ago. No blockchain is unique in this aspect, but Ripple can't do anything unilaterally to accomplish this.

What about the lawsuit claiming Ripple was selling XRP as a security?

This frivolous lawsuit is purely just another fear tactic paid for by competing coin maxis to seed uncertainty in investors. Its premise is that XRP was being sold as a security, but as this poll clearly demonstrates, the vast majority of XRP buyers were clearly aware they weren't buying securities. I also address this head on here

Is premining a bad thing?

Premining is a made-up dirty word to describe the idea that all XRP coins were created on the first day and allocated to Ripple, in direct contrast to the 'mining' mechanism of Bitcoin that slowly distributes Bitcoins. It's merely a strategic difference, but many turn it into an ethical difference, which is preposterous because there is no deception involved. Everybody knows that Ripple holds a pile of XRP, so when people buy XRP, how exactly are they getting scammed? It's bullshit Bitcoin maxi nonsense. Never mind that Satoshi mined a million bitcoins in seclusion before telling the world about it, oh, but that's ok right? Stupid.

What's this about missing XRP ledger blocks?

Ripple had a server issue when they first FIRST started the XRP blockchain, when nobody was using it. They lost the headers for the first set of blocks and were forced to reset the 'genesis' block (the first block) to start now at 32750. All of the balances were preserved and nobody lost anything, especially since there was nobody.

It wasn't seen at the time like a big deal, because it didn't affect anybody, and it only happened because like I already said, they started centralized. It could never happen again because XRP is now completely decentralized.

Somehow though, this urban legend continues to fester a belief that data was lost, people were victimized, fortunes are hidden, etc., etc., all praying upon the masses inability to comprehend that none of this is possible. The entire blockchain is visible, and those blocks before the genesis block are not part of the XRP ledger, like they didn't happen. If you lost your bank statement from January 2013, would that change anything today?

More details here.

What's this about Ripple dumping and keeping the price down?

As mentioned before, Ripple started with all of the XRP, and has been selling these assets (not SECURITIES) to finance the global expansion of the company, as well as many other XRP/crypto-related initiatives such as Xpring, and Ripple for Good, an education and charity arm. Virtually all of their XRP is locked up in cryptographic time-locked escrow that releases 1 billion XRP per month ($200 million at the time of writing), which may or may not be used. Anything left over goes back into a new escrow.

This was done to alleviate any concerns that Ripple might spontaneously decide to smash the value of XRP by dumping their entire stash on the markets; which is the most proposterous theory of all the Bitcoin maxi anti-Ripple theories. Why would Ripple, that needs a higher price for XRP for their product to work more effectively, and that holds a pile of XRP, want to smash the price of it? I'm pretty sure you could stab yourself in the eye too, right? Doesn't mean you're going to do it.

Ripple's stash also acts as a war chest, allowing them to finance their way through the ceaseless challenges and barriers imposed by the FI incumbents when promulgating this new technology through its evolution. It has many other uses too, detailed here.

Even at Ripple's peak XRP sales, Chinese Bitcoin miners were still dumping and pulling 6 times more money out of the markets. Why is there no criticism of that? Moreover, Ripple is using that money to build value into XRP with RippleNet and Internet-of-value. What are Bitcoin miners doing with what's left after paying their electric bills? Cocaine and hookers?

Not to mention that for the past two months, Ripple has virtually stopped all sales, and STILL the price dropped precipitously. There is no clearer evidence that the prices are firmly being controlled by the malicious whales than this. Ripple has ZERO to do with the price of XRP dropping, particularly when one steps back to recognize that the entire market took a beating.

Another point to consider is that Ripple 'must' unload its XRP, for the simple reason that it's the only way to distribute it. Sure, Bitcoin allows miners to receive Bitcoin, but most of those newly-minted Bitcoins go to China, and mining Bitcoins now takes more energy than mining gold. How does giving money to Ripple compare to giving money to these Bitcoin mining psychopaths that would raze the Earth for a few dollars?

How is a trusted UNL supposed to be decentralized?

The answer is very complicated, but for good reason. I try to distill it down here.

Many people say Ripple can freeze your XRP

Don't feel bad if you fall for this FUD. There's a lot of confusion surrounding a gateway's ability to freeze (like Bitstamp), and whether that means Ripple can freeze or not. Reality is, Ripple has no ability to freeze your funds. It's just more fake news that continues to trip up even high profile crypto personalities. A lot of this confusion stems from misguided news articles misconstruing when Ripple asked (not ordered) Bitstamp to stop Jed from selling (stealing) more XRP than was contractually agreed upon.

What about faster cryptos coming out? If a more performant coin comes out, why wouldn't the banks just use that?

Again, unless they are wrapped in a turnkey product that competes directly with the regulated bank-compatible payments service provided by RippleNet, cryptos themselves are not competition. Think about it like this. I can give you $10 and a FedEx box to ship it anywhere in the world. Or I can give you 10 Euros and you have to figure out how to get it to your destination in a regulated insured way. RippleNet is the FedEx box, and banks need that shipping part. Make sense now?

You can't walk up to a bank and convince them to use Euros if they have to do all the heavy lifting to move it around. It's the 'productization' of crypto that leads to adoption, not crypto itself.

What about bank stablecoins? Don't they completely eliminate XRP's use case?

Very popular assumption, but again, stems from not understanding where XRP fits in the big picture. Bank stablecoins are generally walled-garden counterparty-risk coins, meaning that many banks will want to profit from creating their own, and will try to get as many other banks as possible to use their coins. Problem is, Bank of Dubai isn't interested in settling with JP Morgan's very profitable coin for example, and Bank of Dubai will very likely want to create their own very profitable Middle East coin. So, if everyone's motivated to create their own very profitable coins, then they still need to be able to exchange between them.

Any scenario where a group of banks 'do' work with a single bank coin, will be in existing well-liquefied corridors that are already very efficient, and were never being considered by Ripple as part of their market share. In other words, banker's coins don't compete with XRP's use case. And neither do CBDCs. Most fiat is already quite digitized already, and the only benefit of CBDCs would be the instant settlement aspect. CBDC's do not alter the process of exchanging between currencies, Bank of Dubai isn't any more likely to settle in MXN CBDC than it would MXN fiat, and so whether fiat or CBDC is used, XRP's use-case remain viable.

What exactly is XRP's use-case then? With so many currencies, and so many new cryptocurrencies, the number of trading pairs needed would exponentiate and dilute the limited real liquidity to almost a standstill. Think of it like a cobweb of interconnections and every single connection absorbs some of the overall money to be viable.

What XRP is trying to do is position itself as a bridge currency, kind of like the hub of a wheel connecting to every other currency and cryptocurrency (the spokes). In this way, XRP can be incredibly liquid, allowing for only a tiny fraction of the global pairs required to interconnect and exchange between all other currencies. It's a long journey, but I highlight that path here

I heard that because XRP is so fast, that it will be in and out of the exchanges without moving the price, so the price of XRP will never rise.

Myth, crushed here

All the stars are aligned and Ripple's glorious progress is UNDENIABLE. Sure, many MANY things can happen that derails Ripple or XRP, but one can always make up hypothetical scenarios about anything happening to any coin, so what's that worth? What's important is that there's nothing that we can see today standing in the way of Ripple's success.

Don't be tricked out of your opportunity to participate in the success of Ripple's burgeoning global adoption as the flywheel starts to kick in and becomes a self-reinforcing unstoppable behemoth. I won't say we're out of the woods yet. There may be more pain and possibly a more protracted bear market ahead, but the value gravity of XRP will prove itself over time, because manipulators gotta sleep eventually, and gravity never sleeps.

Where were you when XRP was at 20 cents?

Exactly

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