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Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

nytimes.com

11–20 of 111 posts

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#11

The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is. It's completely imaginary, often times irrational and a shared fiction. The fact that we have conventional billionaires at all is almost a ridiculous concept in and of itself, as any amount of tangible work is always done en masse, not by a singular person. Works can be created by individual contributors but it is the…

Which one of these properties of cryptocurrency is imaginary?

  Coins cant be faked or duplicated
  No one can create them at will
  They can be transmitted quickly/globally with low fees (excluding bitcoin of course) 
  You can store them yourself, no bank needed
  Sending huge sums of money is no problem
  Relatively simple design, 8 page white paper
  Has worked as designed for almost a decade
Seems like crypto has a lot unique intrinsic value that surpasses traditional currencies to date.

The only thing imaginary is your imagination. Crypto is very real. Even people on an island would eventually find a common denominator in which to store value which has many of the same properties above.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#12

The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is. It's completely imaginary, often times irrational and a shared fiction. The fact that we have conventional billionaires at all is almost a ridiculous concept in and of itself, as any amount of tangible work is always done en masse, not by a singular person. Works can be created by individual contributors but it is the…

Yet for the first time in history, the island is the entire world.

There was no gradual cross-border liberalization of markets

There was no mega-exchange merger that got approval from multiple continental government regulators

All there was being a new kind of asset that trades freely across the internet and is able to capture the pent up capital of the world, and the market decided.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#13
post #2

A couple other discussions from earlier this week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 (Yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 (Two days ago) I found the top comment in yesterday's thread rather interesting. If there is a hard cap of 100 billion Ripple coins that can exist, and Ripple Labs already owns 60% of them, at today's price of $3.33 that would mean Ripple Labs has $3.33 * 0.60 * 10…

but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#14
post #7
post #4

We had three stories about Ripple appearing in front page in 3 days. What’s going on?

Just read the headline of this article and you'll realize why the current Ripple psychosis is newsworthy. What has happened the last week is historical and scary.

It's the signal the mania stage is nearing an end.

See: Yasumitsu Shigeta

They're playing musical chairs right before the implosion. Ripple might be worth a couple billion dollars as a dangerous speculation. PayPal, an actual, real, live, huge, global, payment & money transfer system, is worth $92 billion.

Some people say you can't place a value on something like Ripple. Sure you can, treat it as an actual business, measure its prospects over the next 3, 5, 10 years. What are those business prospects for the next few years? Not much, less than that of Square and Stripe.

Ripple is just this bubble's CMGI or Internet Capital Group. Bitcoin is this bubble's Cisco or AOL (if it's lucky). The junk ICOs are DrKoop.com or TheGlobe. There's nothing unique about what's going on, history is rhyming as it so often does. It's a likely indication the global liquidity asset bubble party - spurred on by so many central banks pumping crazy levels of liquidity into the global economy for a decade - is reaching toward a climax, again.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#15
post #4

We had three stories about Ripple appearing in front page in 3 days. What’s going on?

People are obsessed with cheap shit, because they took one logical step and said "if this goes up $1, I make more than if Bitcoin goes up $1", but then they leaped over the next step ignoring it completely, which says that there are 100billion XRP, so the likelihood it will go up in price by $1 is rather low.

Granted, enough people bought into the flawed logical to see it happen a couple times over, not realizing that there's no reason for XRP's existence.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#16
This is no different from billionaires that hold massive equity stakes in their own companies, including Zuckerberg.

> Yet the fortunes of Mr. McCaleb and Mr. Larsen are not nearly as durable as those of other people on the Forbes list given that the value of virtual currencies fluctuates wildly. If Mr. Larsen wanted to access his wealth by selling Ripple tokens for dollars, it would likely drive down the value of Ripple tokens — and his riches.

People keep trying to apply a different higher standard to cryptocurrency in order to prove why it cant function as legacy asset classes.

Honestly, I think its because people dont know how the equity/currency/commodity markets work and are synthesizing standards while watching crypto billionaires get minted on the fly to justify their missed opportunities.

In Ripple’s case, the founders are probably more liquid than other equity billionaires. Ripple traded 7 billion usd today, Facebook only 2 billion.

And I dont even like Ripple, but right now I have to fight ignorance outside of the crypto arena.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#17
post #13
post #2

A couple other discussions from earlier this week. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071731 (Yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16057883 (Two days ago) I found the top comment in yesterday's thread rather interesting. If there is a hard cap of 100 billion Ripple coins that can exist, and Ripple Labs already owns 60% of them, at today's price of $3.33 that would mean Ripple Labs has $3.33 * 0.60 * 10…

but they can't sell any of it without annihilating the market. It's like I sell a diamond to my friend for 1 billion dollars, but she pays me 1$ every year for a billion years. So formally I am a billionaire, but actually I am one diamond short.

Tech, meet Econ 101

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#18
post #11

The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is. It's completely imaginary, often times irrational and a shared fiction. The fact that we have conventional billionaires at all is almost a ridiculous concept in and of itself, as any amount of tangible work is always done en masse, not by a singular person. Works can be created by individual contributors but it is the…

Which one of these properties of cryptocurrency is imaginary? Coins cant be faked or duplicated No one can create them at will They can be transmitted quickly/globally with low fees (excluding bitcoin of course) You can store them yourself, no bank needed Sending huge sums of money is no problem Relatively simple design, 8 page white paper Has worked as designed for almost a decade Seems like crypto has a lot unique…

> No one can create them at will

Didn't Ripple Labs create 100 bilion ripple at will?

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#19
post #3

If this’s not a bubble I don’t know what it’s

Since everybody and their grandmother is telling these days it's a bubble, I've somehow come to the believe that this time it's not a bubble. Why?

Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble. Perhaps it was 5% - 10%. At least this was what appeared in the news. The big shots at the central banks didn't see this bubble either, for the most part. But now every big banker is saying Bitcoin is a bubble.

For the dot-com bubble it was much the same. The majority of people (economists, bankers and the like) that should recognise a bubble were only able to call it a bubble in hindsight.

The more I hear this is a bubble, the more of my spare money I will invest into cryptos.

Re: Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

#20
post #3

If this’s not a bubble I don’t know what it’s

Just US market capitalization grew up like 50% in just one year. With all those trillions sloshing around ... the cryptos' $300B is just meager 3% of those $10T that US market bubbled up in the 2017. Add the rest of the world ... The money pressure is growing and it tries to find any place to get into, and until that pressure is relieved the bubbling will continue. Ie. like with any bubble, there is no much value in seeing that it is a bubble, the value is in being able to tell when it is going to burst.
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