Alas poor Ripple
I hold a small amount of Ripple so I follow its price and news. Ripple has been just kind of chugging away, it has partially recovered from the July price crashes but seems to be coming to a new equilibrium quite a bit lower than its previous highs.
Ripple Price USD
screencap from coinranking.com taken 8/8/17 11:41am Pacific
In addition to Ripple I bought in to NEM and IOTA at low prices in July and their performance is kind of making Ripple look weak. Nothing against you personally Ripple.
So what gives? Does Ripple have promise?
Ripple was in the news recently for rebranding their global payments network, which is now called "RippleNet". I have to give them points for creativity and originality. You can read more here: http://www.cryptoquicknews.com/ripple-unveils-expanded-suite-offerings/
RippleNet comes out of the box ready for the types of transactions that banks do every day and has a decent user base already installed. When you look at Ripple in this light, they are ahead of a lot of competitors by actually having a foot in the door. RippleNet is a real product that can be used right now by organizations seeking to realize benefits from blockchain technology, without requiring technical expertise in smart contracts.
On the other hand, Ripple has been in the news in the past for security vulnerabilities, famously ranked dead last among 25 open-source blockchain projects by China CERT (towards the end of 2016):
http://news.8btc.com/blockchain-software-security-report-by-china-cert-ripple-the-worst
And more recently a comprehensive review of Ripple transactions from 2013 - 2017 was published which pointed out a significant vulnerability to malicious attacks:
From the security point of view, although the core of the network is well-connected and provides high liquidity to users, there is a user base of around 50,000 wallets prone to disruption by as few as 10 highly connected wallets. Finally, we find that redistribution of credit (i.e., rippling) among credit links as a result of a transaction puts at risk around 30M USD in the current Ripple network.
Mind Your Credit: Assessing the Health of the Ripple Credit Network
Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Navin Modi, Raghuvir Songhela, Aniket Kate, Sonia Fahmy
Purdue University
June 2017
You can get the full .pdf of the paper here - Recommended reading if you are interested in Ripple (the .pdf download link is in the sidebar): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.02358
You know, it isn't really FUD when it is a real, known, published security vulnerability...
If you think about Ripple in the light of a possible major exploit in the news, then maybe holding Ripple isn't such an attractive proposition!
Anyway, although my mind is not settled on this manner, I continue to hold Ripple. I bought in at a pretty low price and I think there still might be a nice bump in the short term.
Let me know what you think - Carl