Bitcoin Forum

Anyone know who has been buying XRP and why?  The price has been on quite a tear lately.

Because have a new exchange better than Justcoin will launche a few days.

Why wouldn't it be going up? Soon cryptsy will have full integration inside your ripple wallet so you can trade anything, Soon banks will integrate and you can send currency anywhere in under 5 seconds for whatever fee you choose, as of now my fee for any transaction is 0.001 XRP.

Bump

Perhaps it's because banks are starting to use the ripple network. These include two US banks that have recently signed up, and Fidor bank in Germany. Also a team from the Royal Bank of Scotland just won Deloitte Digital #GoneHacking capital markets hackathon by using the Ripple network.

The team at RBS used the open-sourced payments and remittance network from Ripple Labs to add various crypto-currencies onto the FXMicropay service - those included bitcoin, litecoin and Ripple Labs' own ripples (XRP)

http://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=26704&topic=execution

Because Ripple is massively undervalued and investors became aware of it.

its because ripple is doing a very good job lately and a lot of good news came out. they found a us bank who starts to use ripple and rabobank from the netherlands is also testing with it.

xrp was in a downtrend a long time, and now things are really looking positive

Huge interest from banks!!

Because pump, then...

never seen a pump and dump?

just like question why people buying litecoin or bitcoindark

Ripple can be thought as enterprise version of bitcoin, but even if you think that the price is fake - well, how many altcoins don't have "fake" price and people still profit from investing in them?

Two days ago Dogecoinball made fun of Ripple, and in the last frame Ripple pleads "Please KILL ME!!!". Today it's falling apart. Coincidence? I think not!

Major banks are starting to use XRP. This doesn't drive up demand, but it brings in a lot of speculators. They also hold most of the supply creating an artificial scarcity.

Simple Ripple is #2 on coinmarketcap

Ripple is a very well put together software.  It only serves one purpose and one only though, which is trading between tokens of value.  As far as that goes, it so super sweet.  When more people use it the exchange rates will be extremely tight, only take a few seconds to be finalized and in your own personal wallet, and with a transaction fee that is negligible. 

That said, the only real reason a person needs to use XRP is to pay fees.  And right now for a couple of bucks, you can get more than enough XRP to pay all your transaction fees for the rest of your life.  So, there really isn't a reason for the price to be going up so high other than pump.  People think of Ripple like a coin like Bitcoin, and it just simply isn't that.  It is more of just a service and XRP isn't meant to be a store of value or be used as a currency the way people think about other coins, but instead as an anti-spam fee. 

So XRP will either succeed with the pump or fail and join the graveyard of altcoins.

ripple 100% premined = scam
yes, people allow that to happen

XRP goes beyond anti-spam. It acts as a bridge/vehicle currency (http://www.investorguide.com/definition/vehicle-currency.html) and has zero counterparty risk (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/counterpartyrisk.asp). Bitcoin and most alts are also notable for their absence of counterparty risk.

In order to understand Ripple more deeply, let's imagine that the Bitcoin protocol was extended to include:

• Ability for all users to issue currencies from individual wallets
• Ability for all users to exchange issued currencies and Bitcoin via a built-in distributed exchange

Bitcoin gains new potential utility. Let's assume that users on our network have issued the following currencies: LTC, DOGE, JPY, CNY, DRK---and users want the ability to exchange any issued currency for any other issued currency, as such:

• LTC <---> DOGE
• LTC <---> JPY
• LTC <---> CNY
• LTC <---> DRK
• DOGE <---> JPY
• DOGE <---> CNY
• DOGE <---> DRK
• JPY <---> CNY
• JPY <---> DRK
• CNY <---> DRK

10 markets are needed to support 5 coins. It all sounds simple enough. However, as the number of coins increases, the problem expands.

Coins	Markets
5	10
10	45
25	300
50	1225
100	4950
211	22155

In the final row, marked in red, I have taken the number of active BTC markets on Cryptsy. 211 is the number of actual currencies. 22155 markets would be needed to allow any currency to be traded against any other. Beyond simply having those markets enabled, they would also all need liquidity/volume to be meaningful. Complexity arises.

Bitcoin can be used to solve for that complexity, in this scenario, if used as a bridge/vehicle currency in the distributed exchange system. Doing so would allow us to generate all 22155 markets on demand, while needing only 1 actual market for each currency (211 total). Each issued currency would be traded against Bitcoin.

In our earlier example with 5 coins, end users would still see these markets:

• LTC <---> DOGE
• LTC <---> JPY
• LTC <---> CNY
• LTC <---> DRK
• DOGE <---> JPY
• DOGE <---> CNY
• DOGE <---> DRK
• JPY <---> CNY
• JPY <---> DRK
• CNY <---> DRK

In reality, they would work like this under the hood:

• LTC <---> BTC <---> DOGE
• LTC <---> BTC <---> JPY
• LTC <---> BTC <---> CNY
• LTC <---> BTC <---> DRK
• DOGE <---> BTC <---> JPY
• DOGE <---> BTC <---> CNY
• DOGE <---> BTC <---> DRK
• JPY <---> BTC <---> CNY
• JPY <---> BTC <---> DRK
• CNY <---> BTC <---> DRK

Requiring the existence of and liquidity within solely these markets:

• LTC <---> BTC
• DOGE <---> BTC
• JPY <---> BTC
• CNY <---> BTC
• DRK <---> BTC

Expanding 211 markets to 22155 is a cool little trick. Bitcoin is essential to making it work, in this scenario, and is well suited to this task due to its absence of counterparty risk. All other currencies are issued from individual wallets, and therefore entail greater risk.

If you hold Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network, then you have certainty it is yours. Behold the beauty of Bitcoin and zero counterparty risk. If you hold fiat in anything other than your hands, then good luck. An issued representation of JPY on the network may not be redeemable. It may be issued by a gateway, family member, bank, exchange, or even application that you trust---but all of those things are subject to faults. In order to minimize risk, you can choose to exchange your JPY for BTC. Bitcoin is a great store of value in this scenario, again, due to its absence of counterparty risk.

Imagine if market makers, traders, FX services, banks, gateways, card services, and payments providers were all using the system described above. Liquidity. Volume. 5 second international cross-currency payments.

https://i.imgur.com/xYCplTw.png

XRP exists to deliver this functionality on the Ripple network.

And this is a sliver of the broader protocol functionality.

Learn more here (https://ripple.com/trade/ripple-for-market-makers/).

Wow what an outstanding post, this is the future.

That is why Cryptsy uses BTC. I heard many other exchange sites out there do, too. A premined coin probably could not replace that.

What was your point exactly, that we immediately need XRP for that, now?

Nah, just trying to clarify some misunderstandings.

Ripple has solid tech and ideas that the broader cryptocurrency community can benefit from. All of the haters cloud the reality of the project, and the broader community misses out. Ripple offers solutions to many ongoing issues. I would love for people to at least reject those solutions with understanding of what Ripple actually offers.

Ripple source code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/ripple). If people hate core implementation decisions, then they are free to fork, borrow code, or help improve. Addition of mining in a fork could solve for many concerns, and would be a sure hit, but no one has taken that on at a sustained serious level that I am aware of. Splash (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=372486.0) fell through.

Codius (http://codius.org/), a Ripple Labs project, is actually decoupled from Ripple. Any platform can take advantage of this maturing smart contracts/programs implementation, but it is much less effort to repeat baseless conspiracy theories than it is to write code. I think people take on a mentality that pushing Ripple down will somehow lift their investments up.

A lot of misunderstanding surrounds the intent of trust on the network as well. I do not have time to go into detail at the moment, but for a completely different perspective than the regular propaganda: this brief article is worth reading (http://blog.hasslberger.com/2006/03/ripple_pay_open_source_cashles.html).

I'm impressed with the post too.  I knew that Ripple could be the in between currency, but not exactly as explained.

But one more thing.  Does it really matter what the price of XRP if it is the in between?  I mean if I want to change 100 USD for $100 worth BTC and there is no direct path for USD to BTC so it wants to use XRP as the middle man, then does it really matter if 100 USD is represented as 1 XRP or 10,000 XRP?  Because it is just used for 2 seconds as a medium, it seems like the price would be irrelevant, no?

Ripple Labs has never once said buy XRP. People who have watched ripple from the beginning and people from Ripple Labs have advised not to speculate on XRP price. It says on the Ripple Labs site, the XRP price is determined by you and I in the free markets. So maybe it will stay around  5 cents for the next decade who knows. But some people speculate it will be 30 cents by April.

Now Ripple Labs does use the sell of XRP to fund operations. Based on simple econometrics of liquidity and utility of the ripple protocol and the diminishing total of xrp per transaction, the price should increase.

The founders don't have 90% of the supply. More close to 20%. They are all bound to lock up agreements regarding their XRP holdings.

= completely not the same. There is distinct difference to be observed here, especially regarding distribution.

Why is it so important that "someone" or "a few people" have a lot of coins?

Basically, the simple fact that the founders allocated parts of the XRP stash to themselves to compensate for the risk they've taken to the average Bitcoiner here immediatly means that Ripple is a scam. I always find it highly amusing to see how they simply forget that Satoshi himself got like 1 million Bitcoins and could easily crash the market if he wanted so.

All founders are bound to lock up agreements, which means they can't sell their XRP for now or not sell it in any way that it could largely influence the market.

Thanks for this wonderful display of hypocrisy.

In the context of executing an individual IOU ---> XRP ---> IOU transaction the value of XRP is irrelevant. It just acts as a bridge/vehicle.

In advance of executing the transaction, XRP value is relevant for finding competitive exchange rates. Exchange rate will be determined by the value of XRP relative to each of the IOU, provided by a rippled server, and selected by the client submitting the transaction.

Finally an answer.  Hahahaha. Thank you.