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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

#91
post #61

Make no mistake. They're going to make an example of Ripple. This is going to be horrible for them and a warning to anyone trying to run a similar Ponzi scheme. You can't centralise, hype and then cash out on vaporware without there being consequences. XRP held zero value at the time the founder cashed out and they've been trying to make their consulting business work ever since. Dare I say XRP goes to zero. Watch th…

Bitcoin core's lightning should be the next on the chopping block of SEC.

Why? People pay tax on every sale in the US, lightning or not.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#92
post #71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember their original pitch sounding like it made a lot of sense. Fast, cheap, verifiable trading layer for IOUs that can then be settled externally. A lot like how many stock exchanges work. Ended up selling any XRP I had two years ago when things went nuts. Now it looks like people are re-building that whole concept elsewhere and Ripple is becoming irrelevant.

Interesting. Do you have any links to some of the new IOU market maker projects? Cheers

Raiden is doing that for the ethereum network, if you count the fact that each node can be a mediator for multi-hop transfers. https://raiden.network

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually was useful for a brief period as a pretty fast and reliable way to process a transaction. There was a time when a good portion of the major cryptocurrencies had transaction confirmation times on the order of minutes and XRP was one of the few reliable and cheap ways to get a fast transaction (seconds) completed.

Of course, because it's a CENTRALIZED service. I can make a centralized transaction settlement service with a completion time in milliseconds. But it will not have the security and freedom of a decentralized service.

The security of having an audit trail with no way of reversing the transaction and the freedom to get ripped off by a shady exchange?

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#95
We may see a pull back in a few crypto currencies soon.

ETHE the grayscale Ethereum trust has skyrocketed lately and has about 285 Million shares outstanding.

On January4th an additional 1.05 Billion shares come free trading as their 6 month lockup expires.

Oh and its currently trading at a 200+% to its net asset value.

Its conceivable Ethereum itself could double and ETHE could still drop 50%.

Fun times!!

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#96

What are the implications here for the Stellar project and Stellar Lumens? They seem like an awfully similar use case.

From what I remember Stellar started as a fork of XRP by Jed McCaleb, who also created XRP. As I understand it, technically it has evolved a lot since then, so I don't know how much of the concept is still shared with Ripple.

As for what this SEC lawsuit would mean to them, your guess is as good as mine. The price of XLM has dropped a little [0] and actually tracks XRP reasonably closely [1].

[0] https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/xlm/overview/BTC [1] https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/xrp/overview/BTC

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#97
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t remember if I had ever talked to Ryan, but I remember talking to people about this in forums and in person at Stanford and Cal in 2007. By 2005, the financial system was showing signs it was headed toward a point of no return because there was no revenue basis to justify the debt leverage, and the only way out was either extreme dollar scarcity, or previously unthinkable monetary base injections. Either way,…

Thanks for that - very interesting. I think it is possible to create a pure credit/IOU monetary system and I’m working on it at the moment. Though reality is that I spend most of the time reading economics journals... The key is to track reputation and enable the minimum necessary amount of transparency. Eg instead of a single currency like BTC or ETH, everyone becomes an issuer and then the problem then becomes how to efficiently make a market in these currencies by swapping IOUs - essentially what banks do today but in a decentralised way. Furthermore, I think it can be done without a blockchain... Simple tech will do. For one who currently works in the blockchain space - I really like the idea of not using blockchain :)

If you are interested, it’s worth reading the articles “what is money” and “the credit theory of money” by Alfred Mitchell-Innes. He maintained that “credit and credit alone is money” and I mostly agree with him. Another good paper to read is “money is memory”. Oh and Knut Wisksell “interest and prices” is also very good. A lot of literature has been written on pure credit economies but it is difficult to find as it wasn’t ever a popular school of thought. I’m hoping for a revival though!

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I sell my bitcoin for rubles and trade the rubles for USD. a US ban does nothing. and when it eventually gets unbanned you go back to normal.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#99
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.

A single government can easily block it in country — nobody needs or wants Bitcoin, they want to buy things and that can be attacked by targeting whoever participates in the network. Bitcoin is designed to make this extremely easy since that public ledger means they can go after ever transaction you’ve ever made at any point in the future, not just at the time of transaction. Unless the government is incredibly corrupt and powerless nobody is basing a black market on a system which giftwraps your transaction logs for prosecutors.

A government which participates in international banking coalitions or treaty groups can use those relationships to go after transactions internationally, too. Think about how drug cartels have secret bank accounts frozen, and then about how Bitcoin is designed to make that easier by giving the authorities a full list of your activities which is trivially extended to every partner. Once you’re on that list, everyone you know will be getting pressure to turn on you.

Now think about a major government: they can not only use normal law enforcement but also control the exchanges themselves with things like anti-money laundering laws. Someone might choose to blow off demands from a small country or a pariah state like Iran but if the US or EU decided to act everyone involved is now facing things like not being able to fly internationally or do business with most major companies. Since they have no upside to resisting and it’s trivial to block Bitcoin transactions, anyone in those jurisdictions is unlikely to risk that protecting a stranger in a different country.

Re: Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent

#100

We may see a pull back in a few crypto currencies soon. ETHE the grayscale Ethereum trust has skyrocketed lately and has about 285 Million shares outstanding. On January4th an additional 1.05 Billion shares come free trading as their 6 month lockup expires. Oh and its currently trading at a 200+% to its net asset value. Its conceivable Ethereum itself could double and ETHE could still drop 50%. Fun times!!

Your first sentence claims that there's going to be "a pull back in a few crypto currencies", but then the rest of your comment seems to be talking about ETHE, which looks like some sort of ETF for holding ethereum?
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