I guess I can't help myself. I joke with my wife about being unable to leave my computer because "it's an emergency -- someone is wrong on the Internet".
https://xkcd.com/386/

Holy shit, man. This doesn't even matter. Ripple's gone to court to stop Jed from dumping. He's only connected to the company historically. I don't even have a dog in this fight. The worse Jed is, the better it is that he's no longer connected to Ripple. The better Jed is, the better one of Ripple's founders is. It really is a wash.

And what do you think I know? You think Jed confided in me that he knew MtGox was running a fractional reserve? Why the heck would he do that? And if Jed protested his innocence to me, why would I believe him?

I stated all the facts that I know. You seem to think somehow I would have inside knowledge to Jed's relationship with MtGox? Why the hell would that be?

It just seems that no matter what I say, you feel obligated to both disagree with me and insist that it's somehow a big deal that validates your opinions about Ripple.

And, again, when the nonsense you spew is countered with facts, you simply move on to spouting more nonsense. I'm done playing your game.

It's not about whether I find it offensive or not, it's about what it says about your motivations.

Not only do you hate Ripple, but you're entirely unwilling to discuss or examine the claims that have informed your beliefs.

It is, literally, a chain of blocks. As for whether it's centralized, *every* major blockchain currently is to some degree. (Right now, if China made it illegal for a miner to build a block on top of any block that spent particular UTXOs, those bitcoins would be effectively frozen) Ripple, at least, has a plan to improve decentralization and a technology that doesn't inherently centralize. You are completely unwilling to discuss these actual facts.

Do you know that Ripple has gone to court with Jed several times? Ripple now has custody of Jed's XRP to prevent him from making threats of, or actually, dumping XRP on the open market And did you notice a huge change in Ripple's behavior after he left?

Jed left MtGox long before it failed due to insolvency. He did still own some percentage of the exchange (12% I think). I probably know a lot more about Jed's connection to MtGox than you do, and I have no idea what responsibility, if any, he has for the failure of MtGox.

I can't refute a conclusion. Why do you think Ripple will control it?

I would also add that at the moment, bitcoin is also far more centralized than I think most people would like. Its design makes miners stakeholders, and that is inherently centralizing because someone will have the best ASICs and the best price for electricity. Worse, miners interests are averse to the interest of other stakeholders because they want high transaction fees. (I'm long on bitcoin and a big believer. I don't think this is a disaster or deal breaker.)

Ripple is by no means perfect. But in a fair and realistic comparison to other technologies, I think it easily holds its own. You can really only make the kinds of arguments that you're making if you still think that anyone can mine competitively and that governance is not needed (as many people, including me, did back in 2011). But if I want SegWit and you don't, someone has to win and someone has to lose. And without governance, you get paralysis or war.

You have a fact followed by a bunch of insults. Pretty much everyone in this field puts their money where their beliefs are. If you think Ethereum will take over the world, you probably think it's smart to hold some Ether, and so you do. So how can you tell who is being honest and who is just a shill? Easy ... look at what they're saying.

Can they honestly acknowledge the weaknesses of the systems they like most? Do they make reasoned arguments rather than stating conclusions? Do they defend their claims when they're challenged? Do they change their mind when new facts come to light?

I'm not just being paid by Ripple, I was there from day one building the company. The day it no longer reflects my values or I no longer think we're working to make the world a better place, I'll go do something else.

You miss the point entirely. Look at the Internet. The first Internet companies worked closely with the government, building a network with the government as their main customers. Was the point of the Internet to get away from government (or other centralized) control of information? Of course. The key thing was that the Internet was not a network controlled by the government.

That's what we're doing. We're getting the banks to use a network they don't own or control.

You may well be right. And if you are, the way to get there is to bridge the existing financial system in -- because that's where the money is.

If every bank creates their own token, you just reinvent the settlement problem.

If banks create tokens backed by fiat, then each token is tied to a jurisdiction and there's still a huge market in providing liquidity across jurisdictions. (This would be one possible way to improve domestic payments.)

If banks create unbacked tokens, then they have to incentivize all the liquidity themselves and we're way ahead of them with plenty of bank support. They'd have to raise and expend all the funds that we already have.

I have almost no doubt that all of these things will be tried and that some of them will be successful. Bitcoin could also gain significant market share as a settlement currency between inter-ledger exchanges locked in particular jurisdictions (the payment tech Ripple is cooperating to build will, I hope, be good for many cryptos). We think we can position XRP to compete on a level playing field.

You might also start to see more organic growth of XRP. XRP transactions are much faster, cheaper, and more reliable than transactions on any other major blockchain. And XRP has many features that other blockchains don't such as key rotation, native multisign, native support for arbitrary assets, order books, and cross-currency payments, and so on. It may not just be Ripple pursuing international payments for much longer.

Of course, there are no guarantees. These things also might not happen.

I think your point is mostly fair. But this recent drop doesn't seem to have anything specifically to do with XRP. It's an across the board drop of pretty much every crypto-currency. I do agree that people don't talk enough about the inherent risks in the space, specifically:

1) Risk and reward pretty much *always* correlate. If you think you've found a way to get high rewards at low risk, you're almost certainly fooling yourself.

2) It is not that difficult to accidentally wind up with a Martingale like strategy where you very consistently make profits without realizing that you are taking a small risk of a *very* large loss.

That's correct. We're working to build a level playing field. XRP will have to compete with other assets, including BTC and ETH. The idea is to make the pie as big as possible, not to get XRP a big slice of a small pie.

I understand that you have 500 arguments. But I can only solidly address one or two at a time. Every time I do, you refuse to engage with the argument I've made and instead move on to other arguments. That is simply not what someone who cares whether the things they believe are true actually does.

I made one argument in response to one argument you made. You responded by complaining that we've had this conversation before, though we haven't. I asked you to stick to the point you made and my response, you responded with fifty new points.

If you're not going to actually respond to me, stop pretending to.

Again, this is a very specific claim that I'm making: "Banks will use the cheapest path that complies with their regulatory requirements. They don't have to know who supplies the currency to the destination (they don't know now) or how that's paid for (they don't know now). So a payment can be bridged by XRP, the sending and receiving banks can have no idea that's what happened, and they are entirely okay with that."

If you disagree with that, explain why. If not, concede it and move on.

Correct. Ripple has consistently defended the XRP market from dumping by insiders. We've gone to court to do it and we've negotiated agreements to do it. And, of course, it's for our protection as much as anyone else. We'll be the largest holder of XRP for many, many years.

You could get off that merry go round by engaging *my* arguments when you talk to me rather than complaining about what other people are doing. Just a thought.

Yes, I agree that there are people spreading bogus information in support of XRP, just as there are people doing that in support of many other cryptos. And the same goes for people spreading FUD about all of them.

I don't care whether people agree or disagree with me. People are free to have whatever opinions they want and there's no such thing as a wrong opinion. What I'm engaging with is the claims behind the opinions. Claims are either or true or false.

Again, I have claimed that this is a fact several times: "Banks will use the cheapest path that complies with their regulatory requirements. They don't have to know who supplies the currency to the destination (they don't know now) or how that's paid for (they don't know now). So a payment can be bridged by XRP, the sending and receiving banks can have no idea that's what happened, and they are entirely okay with that."

Do you think that's not a fact? If so, why? I replied to you by directly addressing the claims behind your opinions. I've done this several times, and you never defend or abandon the claims. So it's no surprise we're back to square one when you repeat your opinions.

I think you're wrong, but even if you're right, it actually makes no difference. Banks will use the cheapest path that complies with their regulatory requirements. They don't have to know who supplies the currency to the destination (they don't know now) or how that's paid for (they don't know now). So a payment can be bridged by XRP, the sending and receiving banks can have no idea that's what happened, and they are entirely okay with that.

Umm, what?! I just said that trying to do all of the demos and announcements we had originally planned to do at Consensus would have been difficult, so we did them before Consensus specifically to drive interest from potential partners at Consensus. That worked very well in driving interest at Consensus but also resulted in us not doing any major announcements during Consensus.

That's what happened. Originally, we were going to do the three new demos and the various announcements at Consensus. But because that would have been too much to do in a small amount of time, risked getting lost in other announcements in the space, and would have left interested people with little time to find us at Consensus, the strategy was changed to announce every few days before Consensus. I think this strategy worked well -- we had multiple concurrent meetings with potential partners through the entire conference. It would have worked better had I not implied that we would be releasing interesting new things during Consensus, and that's on me.

That's really not so much of an issue any more.

The Chinese government could declare that no miner can build on top of a block that spends a particular bitcoin UTXO and it would be censored. There is no clear plan for how to fix this. Nobody cares enough to actually do anything about it. Whoever has the cheapest power and the best ASICs is a bitcoin stakeholder no matter what you do -- and they want high transaction fees.

Bitcoin's governance is completely paralyzed. The people who believed in bitcoin as a payment system for ordinary transactions can't operate their businesses. The idea that you can have no governance but the system works because interests are aligned has been demonstrated to not be nearly as good as we all hoped and thought it would be.

I'm not bearish on bitcoin. Bitcoin will get through this. But it shows the ridiculousness of complaining about the much less serious drawbacks of a significantly technically superior system.

1) Ripple's consensus protocol doesn't force whoever has the cheapest power and best ASICs to be a stakeholder who wants high transaction fees.

2) Ripple's currency distribution system enriches those who built, and build on, the ecosystem, not power companies and semiconductor manufacturers.

3) Transactions on Ripple confirm faster.

4) Ripple's transaction volume and transaction capacity is much higher.

5) Ripple has functional governance with a clear way for users to change the stakeholders if they don't get what they want.

6) Ripple supports security features like key rotation that are not supportable on a UTXO model.

I still think bitcoin will dominate for the foreseeable future. It got there first. It's good enough technically. There are massive network effects. And there are ways around most of these issues and none of them are deal breakers.

But the number of people making this tired argument that has not stood the test of time well are very, very few now. The facts speak for themselves.

We're quite happy to compete with everything else. We have an actual deployed product that works today. They are experimenting. We are working with their transaction processing people putting machines in their datacenters in their transaction flow. They're working with their innovation people seeing what the technology might be able to do.

We tried for a few years to force banks to use a public ledger. We encountered a lot of opposition and only limited success (compared to where we are now -- we did get several banks onboard, which was completely unprecedented at the time). So we listened to our customers and built a system that doesn't require them to use XRP but eliminates all the technical obstacles to them using XRP as soon as it makes sense to do so. That got us a lot more traction. Now, FIs are actually much more interested and willing to use crypto-currencies. So we may get them using XRP faster than we expected.

This should also be good for bitcoin. The software we sell to banks can use bitcoin as an intermediary too. We believe we can make XRP competitive on a level playing field. I would argue that the market cap and trading volume support that claim even without significant benefits (yet) from us directly promoting XRP this way.

The problem with getting a bank to use a blockchain is not the blockchain. That works. The problem is getting all the other stuff -- compliance, business rules, strategic alliances, integration with existing bank systems. So that's what we're working on. Every bank that adopts Ripple will find all those barriers to adoption gone. Then we can target XRP to strategic corridors and grow from there.

Notice that we had to go to court to do it, just like anyone can. If you have bitcoins at, say, Poloniex, someone can sue Poloniex to have those bitcoins frozen or given to them.

It's important to understand that the public ledger tech XRP uses has been carefully designed to support decentralization and we've been working actively to increase its decentralization as quickly as we can. With luck, the recent increase in value and attention will increase interest in getting new stakeholders to improve decentralization.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/ripple-unveils-strategy-become-decentralized-bitcoin/

With the change in the way XRP is being viewed and used, this is becoming more and more important.

I think XRP has been significantly undervalued for a long time. But honestly, even I don't understand this. Part of it is a combination of lots of different things happening at the same time.

Part of it is the fact that transactions on XRP's ledger just work better. The transaction volume supported is higher and the confirmation time is much, much faster. With bitcoin's transaction fees being so high, backlog being so large, and governance being perceived to be breaking down, there was room left for a system to work better. But that doesn't explain why XRP rather than Litecoin or Ethereum.

Another factor is probably that the increased value and liquidity opens up more use cases. One obstacle to using XRP for many applications was that the value and liquidity just weren't there. Now they are. Ripple is pursuing a use case as an intermediary currency for international payments because we think that's where we can do best. But now others are more likely to use XRP for other applications. I think there's also an expectation that XRP's reach will increase as more companies realize how much money they left on the table this past two months by not supporting XRP.

Also, I know this is going to be controversial, but it is a fact that XRP's consensus model fosters better governance than bitcoin's PoW model. Bitcoin's PoW model makes miners major stakeholders -- without enough of them, the blockchain is not secure. And their interest can be averse to those of the users/holders of bitcoin. For a long time, it wasn't an issue. Everyone just wanted the system to work, to grow, and for the price of bitcoin to go up. But now, with transaction fees exceeding the block reward, the miners are pursuing their own interests to the detriment of the rest of the community.

Consensus has no miners -- the users are the sole stakeholders. Mining is inherently centralizing because someone will have the best price for power and the best price for ASICs. Consensus is neither inherently centralizing nor decentralizing. That means it won't be decentralized by itself. It will take work to increase decentralization. But at least we don't have the technology's inherent properties working against us. (And I concede, we have a lot more to do on this front. Also, in compensation for this advantage, consensus also has some disadvantages -- primarily a public good problem with validators.)

This doesn't have to be a big deal. The miners need bitcoin to work and right now it's not working very well. Hopefully bitcoin will work through its governance issues. I truly believe that what's good for bitcoin is good for the space and what's bad for bitcoin is bad for space. We shouldn't be fighting each other over the current market share, we should all be pursuing increased market share. ILP will be good for bitcoin and ethereum too.