The Weekly Waffle: A Ripple Effect

I’m not going to comment on the SEC, the Hinman emails, all the rumors and speculations; hell, I won’t even mention the legal bowl of noodles around the “securities” question. I’m not a lawyer and frankly, I don’t care.?

But this week will be all about Ripple and XRP. It would be somewhat hypocritical not to comment on the subject, given the support my employer Uphold has shown for XRP over the years.?I am constantly being told to be careful of what I say. That's good and necessary. After all, individuals represent the companies (or DAOs they represent, as we have learned this week frorm the CFTC)

Crypto was born out of a desire to make the world a fairer place. Projects like Cardano, Coorest, or World Mobile Token stand tall as “crypto for good” in a morass of greed and speculation by financially illiterate crypto bros and Wall Street veterans alike.

I’m not too fond of money, to be honest. It brings out the worst in people. But crypto can do a lot to make money less concentrated in the hands of the few or manipulated by the interests of oligopolies. ?Crypto can do good.

There is also philosophical and idealistic connection. Uphold was founded on the principle of radical transparency — actually, the reason I sign up for this gig. We are part of the future of finance. Our management team is full of brilliant people with decades of experience in finance. People who could all have retired and restored vintage Bentleys, or go trout fishing in Montana and golfing in Florida. I was about to buy a sailboat and explore the Mediterranean. But I didn’t. I signed up for a very difficult, sometimes frustrating, but immensely intellectually rewarding job. Most of us at Uphold put down the screwdrivers, fishing rods and golf clubs because we aren’t afraid of challenges and share a genuine desire to make the world better and fairer.?

This brings me to my view of XRP -- something I have never discussed publicly.

A big part of the #XRP community still believes that XRP was created for banks or to help institutions, especially for CBDCs and cross-border payments, which are still ridiculously inefficient. I don't think CBDC will ever work on a blockchain like Ripple, the programmability and privacy questions are simply too big, and XRP isn't the best option.

However, banks and payments weren't part of Ripple ’s original vision which was to "destroy bank monopolies and facilitate #disintermediation.

Ripple's initial vision was to "enable people to break free of the walled gardens of financial networks like credit cards, banks, PayPal and other institutions that restrict access with fees, charges for currency exchanges and processing delays."

Ripple mentioned this on their website in 2013. Its prior incarnation OpenCoin started with a vision to build an open payments system and a peer-to-peer credit network for people - not banks. As such, it has always been in the crosshairs of Wall Street and the powers that rule over our sacred greenback.

>> https://spectrum.ieee.org/ripple-credit-system-could-help-or-harm-bitcoin

This is a brilliant and visionary article from 10 years ago. It has nuggets that are still true today.?

“Confidence in Bitcoin’s centralized exchanges is especially wobbly following a series of hacking incidents last year. […] And a larger problem looms the specter of government regulation. If any country decides to outlaw Bitcoin, bearing down on the exchanges will be the easiest way to do it.”?

Only a handful of ignoramuses and tyrants (like China) have outlawed crypto, but Ripple's 2013 point is valid: depending on exchanges isn't part of the original crypto-punk ideal. That's why Uphold isn't an exchange, but a transparent platform that allows trading across exchanges, and, more importantly, decentralized venues. Our new institutional platform is live and clients love it, especially because they can trade on a #DEX via a trusted name.

Ripple had a vision that went beyond anything we had seen in crypto back in 2013. It was the first viable answer to Bitcoin. Bitcoin was then a store of value, with the inflation narrative emerging only slowly. 2013 was the year we became aware that the 21 million cap argument is actually a bug, not a feature.

“Ripple?allows individuals to create credit and disburse it to people within a peer-to-peer social network. If the design pans out, the credit created in Ripple could itself become a new form of digital currency and the first formidable competition for Bitcoin.”?

It goes back even further.

Ripple's OG concept predates Bitcoin and was first implemented by Ryan Fugger, a Web developer in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. His idea was to create a way for people to extend credit to strangers through the people they already knew. "For example, if I trust Alice, who trusts Bob, I can offer my credit to Bob in an agreement backed by Alice."

The Bitcoin argument is that transparency and immutability in blockchain remove the need for humans to trust each other. We've learned some time ago that this is not true.

“The goal was to create a system of debt money without artificially imposed scarcity,”

Fugger said in an e-mail. What that meant in practice was giving individuals the power to operate as their own banks, with the ability to issue credit.

“What Ripple is designed to do is get rid of the need for money to settle debts, because debts can be canceled out against each other. So if I send you an IOU for 10 and you send me an IOU for 10, then we don’t need to settle anything, because our debt will just cancel out,”?

Well, a lot has changed since then. There are now many options available that have similar or better visions. Ripple’s founders are good and idealistic people. And at heart this is a question of ideals. And a question of truth.?It’s hard to speak the truth in crypto -- you get flamed, banned, or bullied on Twitter, and the entire space is a garden of silos with young males yelling at each other as if they were at a football match. Allegiance is more important than truth for many.

Not for me. My often funny, sometimes troubling political incorrectness is well known. Life is too short to NOT stand up for your beliefs.

For example, I’m not too fond of the federated BFT (FBA) that underpins XRP and others. It seems outdated to me. But understanding it is crucial to your investment rationale for XRP. And it is a brilliant piece of tech, that was once absolutely revolutionary.

I also think the original argument for XRP of speed and low fees is no longer relevant

“Although the architecture of Ripple will be conceptually similar to that of Bitcoin, by design it will consume much less electricity than Bitcoin and will be able to conduct transactions over the course of seconds rather than minutes.”?

We already have many other networks that do that, some like Koinos having no fees at all and Kaspa being around 3000x faster than XRP.?

I may have a different opinion on some technical issues and I don’t care about the investment opportunity here. What I do care about is the original vision. It is brilliant. Revolutionary. Good.?Fair.

And for me at least, crypto had always been about making our world a fairer place, not dominated by big corporations and oligopolies.?It has always been about use cases, from personal identity, medical records, clinical trials, supply chain management, charity, and giving the underprivileged access to the tools of the wealthy.

With all the fud and speculation, the rumors and the professions of eternal love for "America, Jesus, and XRP!" I like to remind myself that ultimately this isn't about legal definitions, corruption, tribal allegiances, or price targets.

It's about fairness. Equality. Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we remember that and hold it to be true, then whatever we do will have a ripple effect that will ultimately lead us to the promised land.

Credit for the inspiration goes to https://lnkd.in/dcgka39y please follow this excellent thinker.