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Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

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Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#41
post #3

Won’t have an impact on the broader crypto market, but it will signal that the US is diehard anti-crypto. So many companies have already moved offshore, anyone trying to play in the US should get out ASAP. Who is the SEC protecting? Anyone who has bought XRP doesn’t give a shit.

> but it will signal that the US is diehard anti-crypto. From the article: SEC officials have declared Bitcoin and Ether to be currencies, as they are decentralized in their management, but have left the door open for others to qualify as securities, especially at the time of their issuance. So not really. The US needs to evolve to the new world.

The SEC (an extension of the Federal Reserve) can turn around and declare whatever is useful at any point, as has been observed. There's nothing special or protected about the traded Cryptos, despite the speculation.

If a currency crisis arises and the market is frozen, cryptos will not be on the first lien right to trade for Fed assets (whatever that currency might end up to be) or even continue trading, depending on the decisions of the Fed. Hell, I don't expect the issued currency (cash - which the long tail of people are still using) will have that right...since the Fed board members aren't going to be running around with palettes of cash when buying goods either.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#44
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thought exercise, not a serious suggestion that it might occur, hence "if it thought there were grounds to do so." I'm imagining how a Government with sufficient power might go about crippling the value of BTC.

A single government can’t do it, which is why bitcoin still exists.

The US could cripple bitcoins value quite easily by sanctioning exchanges. The main power it would have to enforce those sanctions would be to cut off any institutions that violate them from handling USD. This is how the US manages to do stuff like force French banks to uphold US sanction on Iran.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bnp-plans-to-slash-dividend-sel...

That wouldn’t eradicate Bitcoin or anything, but it would make it far less useful than it is currently, and have a significant impact on its value. It would also be a pretty bad idea, because the power of US sanctions is largely derived from demand for USD, and political volatility puts downward pressure on that demand, so you generally don’t want to waste it on frivolous sanctions.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

Because you might as well just use an SQL database

“Proof of authority” chains are a lot more than just a database. There is still a verifiable audit trail etc.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#46

What I've never understood about XRP and Ripple is that originally XRP was meant to only be used for paying for transactions and the ledger was meant to track IOUs between people denominated in some other "real" currency. They had videos floating around explaining the concept. In fact, they were handing out XRP for free to bootstrap the network of users [0] (that post says 1000 XRP, originally it was 30,000 XRP when…

No, that was the idea of Ripple, invented by Ryan Fugger long before bitcoin even existed, and requires no new coin or token for its operation. OpenCoin, a company founded by Jed McCaleb, bought the trademarks other IP for Ripple and rebranded their bitcoin competitor altcoin as XRP. They never had any interest in the original concept, and quickly threw it away when it was no longer fashionable.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#47
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a currency based on cryptography, let's not try to exclude projects based on random definitions. You want to be more specific, like, it is not censorship-resistant.

Ok, but the cryptography is pointless if it's a centralized system.

you hold the key to decide what to do with the funds

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#48

What I've never understood about XRP and Ripple is that originally XRP was meant to only be used for paying for transactions and the ledger was meant to track IOUs between people denominated in some other "real" currency. They had videos floating around explaining the concept. In fact, they were handing out XRP for free to bootstrap the network of users [0] (that post says 1000 XRP, originally it was 30,000 XRP when…

Yup, the original vision of Ripple was payment channels, like what the Lightning Network is trying to be today. Pretty shameful how they abandoned all that to become a shitty version of PayPal.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#49
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but the cryptography is pointless if it's a centralized system.

you hold the key to decide what to do with the funds

Which Ripple can invalidate if they control the network, which they do.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#50

https://kin.org/ got sued by the SEC for the same reason. They 'got away' with a 5m fine but were not branded a security (does that automatically declare them a currency?). They're now free to carry on development with the SEC behind them. The difference is they just moved to Solana as a token, so they're decentralized, whereas what I take from XRP is that it's not. I don't fancy XRPs chances seeing what the Kin boys…

> does that automatically declare them a currency?

If they were branded as a security that would not automatically declare them to be a currency. It would put them in the category of equity securities (with the owners having rights accordingly as equity owners). USD holders are not regarded as having an equity ownership stake in the currency for example.

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