Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by 3cham » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:35 AM UTC

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #15

noncoml wrote: 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 tha…

Could you please elaborate more on the point that there's no reason for XRP's existence?

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

#32

Post by adventured » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:37 AM UTC

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…

At the height of the dotcom bubble, people were very widely calling it an insane bubble.

I read just about every financial story about it that came out during those ~2.5 years it lasted (the actual bubble was short lived). It was fairly evenly split between two camps, one represented by the bubble pumpers calling it the new economy (or different this time; they had lots of bumper sticker sayings), the other by traditionalists focused on relatively normal valuation metrics. Guess who prevailed. Warren Buffett, as always. Nearly all of the public dotcoms collapsed or were liquidated for pennies on the dollar. Few survived and thrived, Amazon barely made it out alive. Those thousand crypto coins? They will not survive. A few will, and they'll thrive - thrive meaning, they'll be lucky to be worth what they are today, in another ten years.

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

#33

Post by andymcsherry » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

skydv wrote: post #13

tristanj wrote: 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.

$1/year for a billion years isn't worth a billion dollars. It's essentially a perpetuity, which is worth $1 / the prevailing interest rate. If that rate is 5%, you're only worth $20

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

#34

Post by bmking » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:41 AM UTC

skydv wrote: post #13

tristanj wrote: 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.

It depends. Surely they could not instantly dump all of their "ripple assets" and expect the market to absorb it. But currently the 24-hours trading volume is 6.6 billion USD (https://www.livecoinwatch.com/price/Ripple-XRP). A huge part of that may be wash trading due to some zero-fee exchangers. Nevertheless I am speachless how relatively speaking a lot of money is actually being poured into this right now.

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

#35

Post by codegladiator » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:46 AM UTC

tromp wrote: post #30

codegladiator wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Doesn't that defeat the purpose of having soft currency ? Hardware wallets sure can be stolen physically right ? Leaving that chuck of currency useless (if not transferred fraudulently)

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

#36

Post by beebmam » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

There are also downsides of course too. But I think the reality is that the future will have both crypto currencies and fiat currencies. Both have advantages.

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

#37

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

> Well, during the mortgage crisis, very few economists would actually claim it was a bubble.

During the mortgage crisis, basically every notable economist and economic commentator was calling it a bubble; some had been for several years, and some only very late (but still before it popped), but it absolutely is not the case that the concept was rare my stated.

The closest your statement is to truth is that there weren't lots of people accurately predicting the timing of the bubble popping, but that's a different thing than recognizing the bubble.

> For the dot-com bubble it was much the same.

It's true that he dot-com bubble was much the same as the mortgage bubble, but only in that it equally did not match your “no one was calling it a bubble” description.

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

#38

Post by ringaroundthetx » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

Brede wrote: post #28

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.

All ripple accounts require 20 xrp which cannot be moved so this is an impossibility to begin with

Xrp holders have some function in the network, I forgot

And you could name the price for anyone else that wanted xrp or to use the network

Although I would say Ripple’s XRP is not the settlement solution Id be looking for, I wouldnt say owning 99.999% of them makes it worthless

Owning all of a commodity doesnt make it worthless, even when that commodity is a unique collection of cryptographic signatures

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

#39

Post by stock_toaster » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:51 AM UTC

tromp wrote: post #18

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…

> No one can create them at will Didn't Ripple Labs create 100 bilion ripple at will?

Someone is going to owe a lot of taxes?

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

#40

Post by ilitirit » Fri, Jan 05, 2018, 8:53 AM UTC

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…

> The thesis statement here is value itself is an arbitrary concept and is such because we say it is.

Depending on how you view the world, this can seem like pretty much a very obvious statement. Before mankind there was no "value". We invented it, and it evolved with us. At some point it even became self-referential ("I am valuable now because I become even more valuable later").