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Rise of Bitcoin Competitor Ripple Creates Wealth to Rival Zuckerberg

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81–90 of 111 posts

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

#81
post #55

Yeah, he's pretty rich... if he cashes all his Ripple at the price point of the current highest bidder. However, said bidder will not want all of it, so some will go at a lower price, and so on. Eventually the price may become extremely low due to the very high supply (which diminishes demand again). I wonder if this is taken into account. All crypto starters are rich in their own coins but they can never cash it in,…

Wanna be billionaire buddies? Issue 1 billion teekertcoins, I'll buy one from you for $1 if you do the same.

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

#82
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't find anything that does better than litecoin. Also this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JarEszFY1WY shows the fundamentally different viewpoints between bitcoin and bitcoin cash. As someone mentions in the video what bitcoin cash is trying to do is implement business logic inside the protocol which is a layer violation.

Litecoin is basically following Bitcoin's approach to scaling which will leave it congested if it gets popular enough. Litecoin already has much higher fees than Bitcoin Cash. Litecoin's development has basically been nonexistent since it's invention and has only been copying Bitcoin ever since. Bitcoin Cash is also quickly gaining merchant adoption with for example BitPay, something Litecoin has failed to do in many…

Bitcoin cash's approach to scaling is just not sustainable and leads to centralization. You cant just increase the block size each time the mempool fills. In a couple of years no one would be capable to run a full node on consumer hardware. Also you open up all kinds of different ways for the network to be attacked. With a 1MB block size an attack block will take 40 seconds to validate with a 2MB size it will take 14 minutes. The correct solution to scaling is a Layer 2 protocol.

Bitcoin Cash's mantra is that they want people to treat 0-confirmation transactions as safe which is absolutely the opposite of what the whole protocol is about. Check this infographic that was tweeted a few hours ago https://twitter.com/Bitcoin/status/949019786704547842

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

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick... crypto currencies are fiat currencies (if they're currencies at all, rather than commododites) Edit: Fiat just means its value is driven by supply/demand rather than being backed by something like gold.

Mineable crypto is not fiat because it cannot be created or destroyed at will. That is what gives it value over a fiat currency. You don't have to worry about a central government devaluing it or inflating it artificially.

I see your point, you're tying "fiat" to the act of spontaneous creation at will rather than the lack of a backing commodity, but I don't agree that definition, and even if I did I'm not sure it's as cast-iron a distinction as you're implying.

You absolutely do have to worry about price manipulation... the only difference is that it's not specifically governments it's just the disproportionately wealthy. I don't see that as a worthwhile distinction.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/14/how-bots-are-manipulating...

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-06/mysterious-trader-...

https://cointelegraph.com/news/single-trader-with-enormous-b...

Similarly you can destroy cryptocurrency (some at least), and it can be created. The fact that the creation rate is constrained by the prudence of an algorithm designer rather than constrained by the prudence of a central banker seems like another arbitrary distinction.

To me it feels like crypto proponents want a fancy economics term for othering conventional currencies, so the definition is being bent to fit.

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

#84
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

if i have 20 ripple but can't spend them - how is that different from having 0 ripple?

You gave someone else $40 for free.

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

#85
post #81
post #55

Yeah, he's pretty rich... if he cashes all his Ripple at the price point of the current highest bidder. However, said bidder will not want all of it, so some will go at a lower price, and so on. Eventually the price may become extremely low due to the very high supply (which diminishes demand again). I wonder if this is taken into account. All crypto starters are rich in their own coins but they can never cash it in,…

Wanna be billionaire buddies? Issue 1 billion teekertcoins, I'll buy one from you for $1 if you do the same.

Sounds good, Three Commas Club here we come! (Let me first start with a course on constructing Blockchains though... or who cares, lets just use an Excel file for bookkeeping!)

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

#86
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make it sound like 'anything' could be a currency. When in reality finding a common medium of exchange is extremely difficult, and must meet a lot of the properties I listed above. In terms of 'currency technology' crypto is a huge advance over our current standard currencies.

Anything can be a currency so long as enough people agree there is value. Bristol (a smallish city in the UK) has it's own currency that can be used locally that is accepted by shop keepers etc. You can't pay your mortgage with it but you can buy you apples with it.

We could use shiny stones as currency if enough people agreed it had value.

I think you are thinking about currency within the confines of the current system (eg government, laws etc). What I am saying is that government and laws are only valid in our collective imaginations and therefore everything is imaginary and made up (the USD is just as imaginary as bitcoin, it's just that more people believe in the USD so it is mainstream) and we can collectively apply value to anything want to and remove value from anything we want to.

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

#87
post #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 i…

What makes me certain it's a bubble is all the stories my wife tells me of people from her native Malaysia. Her mother wants to buy in, her mothers friends want to buy in, people take out their pension funds for it, a guy sold his profitable albeit small restaurant to go all-in on bitcoin and so on.

Now it's somewhat understandable given the fact that Malaysias currency has not been very stable in recent years and people are struggling. But people investing all they have into such a volatile market is going to lead to a rude awakening.

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

#88
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Litecoin is basically following Bitcoin's approach to scaling which will leave it congested if it gets popular enough. Litecoin already has much higher fees than Bitcoin Cash. Litecoin's development has basically been nonexistent since it's invention and has only been copying Bitcoin ever since. Bitcoin Cash is also quickly gaining merchant adoption with for example BitPay, something Litecoin has failed to do in many…

Bitcoin cash's approach to scaling is just not sustainable and leads to centralization. You cant just increase the block size each time the mempool fills. In a couple of years no one would be capable to run a full node on consumer hardware. Also you open up all kinds of different ways for the network to be attacked. With a 1MB block size an attack block will take 40 seconds to validate with a 2MB size it will take 14…

This black and white thinking is just not practical. "Since very large increases will disallow nodes on consumer hardware we will block any increase" is just poor engineering.

The approach of Bitcoin Cash is to allow the increase when possible. 8MB is for example perfectly doable today on consumer hardware. Investigations are ongoing for how large the blocks can become and improvmenets are being made on for example propagation time and allowing faster startup of nodes.

For example 1GB have been propagated and validated in a timely manner by consumer hardware existing today. (Not saying we should bump it up right now, but the capabilities are here).

> With a 1MB block size an attack block will take 40 seconds to validate with a 2MB size it will take 14 minutes.

That's just wrong.

Edit: Because Bitcoin Cash eliminates the quadratic hashing problem.

> Bitcoin Cash's mantra is that they want people to treat 0-confirmation transactions as safe which is absolutely the opposite of what the whole protocol is about.

No it's not. There are different degrees of safe which Bitcoin totally fails to acknowledge. Buying a coffee with 0-conf and a basic double spend heuristic is perfectly fine and has been done on Bitcoin until full blocks (and RBF) killed it, for example by shapeshift. xmr.to which converts Monero to Bitcoin is also accepting 0-conf for smaller amounts.

Here again the extremist black and white thinking is bad.

> The correct solution to scaling is a Layer 2 protocol.

No, the correct solution combines on-chain and off-chain scaling.

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

#89
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's like saying Bezos or Gates aren't really worth ~60B dollars, like the news are repeatedly saying though. Isn't that right? Considering most of their wealth is in stocks.

It is technically right. However, even in a 100% firesale, they could make - say - $10bn to $20bn, because the fundamentals of their companies' earnings and dividends would entice sufficiently many new investors to step into the market.

Cryptocoins have no such fundamental value backstop - someone desperately trying to sell a large fraction of the market cap would drive the price to basically zero in short order.

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

#90
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You make it sound like 'anything' could be a currency. When in reality finding a common medium of exchange is extremely difficult, and must meet a lot of the properties I listed above. In terms of 'currency technology' crypto is a huge advance over our current standard currencies.

It's not even the same thing as normal fiat currency. It's a commodity whose value is predicated upon its shininess, rarity and ease of transfer.

It's basically gold if arbitrary bits of gold could be sent via email.

Bitcoin probably wouldn't have taken off at all if the financial markets were quite so desperate for new toys to speculate with. Bitcoin is the bastard step-child of low interest rates.

It's massively exposed to the threat of financial regulation, too. If the US government suddenly decided that it was going to assume bitcoin transfers are the result of money laundering until proven otherwise and that it's a consumer product that you have to pay sales tax on, its value would plummet to embarrassing depths.

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