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Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

nytimes.com

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

#21

Post by codecamper »

iamleppert wrote: post #5

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…

Interesting.. even us as "technologists" are much more interested in money.

Witness the number of posts here.

I think the original bitcoin post had about 3 responses. Wish I was paying attention that day!

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

#23

Post by codegladiator »

pixie_ wrote: post #11
iamleppert wrote: post #5

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…

> Has worked as designed for almost a decade

"worked as designed" can be said for every thing. Everything works as designed. Yet gets hacked/stolen/cracked/misused. Banks are working as designed. And so is the government. Just that the majority will dislike the design because they have no say in it.

> You can store them yourself, no bank needed

And then you can loose it yourself too. Remove all the safeguards which was built thru decades of learning and allow everyone to shoot themselves and everyone else in the foot.

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

#24

Post by codecamper »

trhway wrote: post #20
bekman wrote: 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…

And they say this money is owned by just 10% of us all. I think this is what is driving valuations. People who literally can afford to lose money.

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

#25

Post by simonbarker87 »

pixie_ wrote: post #11
iamleppert wrote: post #5

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…

You’ve missed the point a bit which is why you are getting down voted. Much of our non physical world (money, value etc) are abstractions for something else and therefore the abstraction only has value in humanity’s collective imagination. If you try to give a goat farmer in the desert a bit coin he won’t take it as to him it literally has no value as he likely can’t access the internet or work out how to turn it in to something else. If we ALL collectively decided tomorrow that bit coins have no value (or the US dollar even) then it would loose its value. Much of our non physical world only stands up because we all agree it does, enough people change their minds and it all falls down.

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

#26

Post by kosei »

wsc981 wrote: post #19
bekman wrote: 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 i…

This seems like confirmation bias to me. How many bubbles or fads were called by people that evaporated (beanie babies, troll dolls, etc)?

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

#27

Post by kosei »

EGreg wrote: post #10
jeron wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone holding ripple, I'm okay with this vicious cycle

Someone should start a hedge fund finding ICOs with really well-connected teams, such as Tron (Alibaba connections) to predict the next wave of stories => rise => stories => rise. I for one would put $$ into that hedge fund.

Just as long as they get the money out before the musical chairs stop.

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

#28

Post by Brede »

ringaroundthetx wrote: post #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 Ri…

The difference is very simple.

If you buy all ripple tokens in existence, they are useless. If you buy all facebook stocks in existence, you own facebook.

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

#30

Post by tromp »

codegladiator wrote: post #23
pixie_ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Has worked as designed for almost a decade "worked as designed" can be said for every thing. Everything works as designed. Yet gets hacked/stolen/cracked/misused. Banks are working as designed. And so is the government. Just that the majority will dislike the design because they have no say in it. > You can store them yourself, no bank needed And then you can loose it yourself too. Remove all the safeguards which w…

> And then you can loose it yourself too.

Admittedly, hardware wallets do a good job of keeping your private keys secure, allowing you to safely transact even on a malware infested PC.

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