Hi All,
I wanted to share a quick story of a new trend I keep seeing in all social media groups that are cryptocurrency related. I have been involved in crypto for over 6 years now and I am a part of several crypto groups in other social media, lately, I keep seeing people posting everywhere regarding Ripple (XRP) and it's future profitability and potential for growth.
Everywhere I look I see people encouraging newbies to buy XRP as the price is going to "moon" and make them very wealthy, while I agree that there is room for potential growth, I believe that exponential growth compared to other crypto projects with a definite amount of tokens in circulation is simply irrealistic based on the coin cap of XRP of about 300 billion, let me repeat that 300 BILLION coins. The first issue with the number of coins is that it is simply too much, currently, we are over 8 billion people on earth (if not more by now) which is a hypothetical case where every human being gets to hold one coin even then the supply is 10X times the amount of people which drives demand down as there is simply too much. If there is anything I have learned in crypto is that supply and demand rule just like every other market in the world which leads me the next point... who is actually benefiting from this?
Simple, the banks and not the average Joe investor. If you have thought about investing in ripple, you are probably not familiar with the ultimate purpose of cryptocurrency which is the liberation from central banking manipulation in our economy. When you Invest in ripple you will be siding with the "enemy" not just by supporting their project but you will be literally funding their project to make it a successful one, let's think about it for a minute from a different perspective.
Your current bank is planning on investing in their internal infrastructure so that they can process transactions faster and easier, in this example the banking institution (corporation) will invest their profits to make this project a reality. When a corporation invests money they are usually waiting for a return on investment (ROI) that could translate in higher transaction fees since they made it easier and faster and from those fees, they will recover their investment and ultimately profit from it.
It is fine for the bank to invest their own money so they can keep their monopoly but here is the catch, since ripple's inception the banks have seen that they don't really need to invest in infrastructure and "the people" will actually do the investment for them so that they can grow faster without having to invest much, in any way this is a "win,win" situation for the bank.
The next and most important issue with ripple is simply that it undermines all efforts from all other cryptocurrencies, think about it for a minute, we have so many crypto projects that achieve the same purpose and without the need of a central "manipulator" it seems pretty ridiculous to bet against the ideal that cryptocurrency brought to the world.
Lastly, my biggest concern is that 70% of the total coin count is being held by insiders which could very well lead to future price manipulation and given then players in this field, I would look at this situation with care and concern as a possible outcome.
In conclusion, my own personal opinion is that ripple sucks. If you are a banker with bigger interests then please be my guest to drop some money on ripple but if you believe in crypto and its potential don't side with the enemy and let the bankers grow ripple on their own while we keep creating our crypto micro economies of the future. I understand that some of my points here might be controversial and a lot of people might not share the same points of views but I really don't get what is so special about ripple.
I would love to hear some feedback from the steemit community since everyone here seems to be ahead of the game compared to mainstream social media people who only talk about having verification issues in coinbase aghhhh....