I am the very last person to bash on another coin, mainly because I feel it is counter productive to the movement as a whole to empower people with the right to their own money. With that said, its fairly obvious that ripple labs along with their circle jerking friends here are not in this to do anything but line their own pockets with dirty money.
Care to explain the blatant market manipulation done today (11/23/2014) along with the market manipulation done on August 26th 2014?
Ripple did not double its value because they are as sweet as my grandmother, it doubled because A. serious market manipulation and B. utilizing that along with some news to pump their own chest and get people to buy into it. Which reminds me, who got these tokens that ripple distributed? Were they given as "deals" as the OP said? "Hey, here is a million dollars if you team up with us" is what I see (literally, a million).
Bitcoin vs. Ripple is a tired and dead line of thinking. Ripple is complementary to Bitcoin and alts. BTC markets on Ripple (click through via the BTC/XRP chart) account for a huge portion of daily volume. Ripple is great for transfer of currency between exchanges, banks, and other money services. Cryptsy is adopting Ripple for a damn good reason.
Cryptsy is the worse example you could have used. They can't even get their regulations straight since im 99% sure the Oct. FinCen clarification letter was due to their own either stubbornness or ineptitude to follow the rules (meaning, the clarification letter was their fault since they have been trying to skirt the rules).
In some senses, purchasing XRP is like buying stock at an exchange. No difference exists for the majority of cryptocurrency users, who acquire cryptocurrency through exchanges. Absence of mining, however, does make it vital that miners spread FUD about non-mined coins to protect their bottom line. ASICs, graphics cards, and electricity are not cheap. Ripple arguably dominates in functionality.
No, there is a major difference. Those people are buying cryptos from other people, the exchanges are merely their parties there to facilitate the transactions. Ripple labs is selling these or giving them away in deals outside traditional means yet trying to utilize traditional ways to calculate value. Ergo, the market manipulation that I have mentioned several times already.
Since you missed it in the other thread (actually I'm sure it was ignored because you didnt want to address it), care to explain the inconsistencies I pointed out in my other post?
So I think I found the reason, of course ive never looked in depth into these charts before so I do not know if this data was integrated recently or not.
http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#marketsSeems that the largest points of data are coming from ripple labs themselves as far as marketcap via ripple charts. Ive tried to poke around their website to see where the data was coming from and it was difficult, (the details next to the market cap provided button seems to be broken, and navigating around the site will sometimes display charts as internal server errors).
Ripple Charts is built and maintained by Ripple Labs, based on data from the Ripple Network.
Interestingly enough, these charts seem to exclude a quarter of the supposed marketcap with BTC38. If the data is coming directly from the ripple network, why does it not show an entire quarter of data? I would expect that these charts built by ripple labs would want to include all data.
All in all this smells really fishy, much like how ripple "passed" Litecoin marketcap. For those unaware, they really didn't pass Litecoin at all. The only thing they did was release a bunch of coins onto the network and changed the supply available. And since marketcap is calculated by price X supply, it shot up in one day (straight vertical line). Additional irony of this is that I dont think these tokens are in circulation, I think they are held by one whale. Therefore in essence nothing really changed except for the market manipulation that ripple did.
With that all said, this doesnt pass the smell test. Pretty sure this is more market manipulation to get "buy in".
Lastly, what gives ripple value? And please dont say "investors" because that is a failed economics policy. What backs ripple? And also again, who did those 2 air drops of coins go too?
I'm not a troll, I firmly believe ripple and ripple labs are a pure scam. Hence this post.
EDIT: Bottom line, ripple is a company and has no business claiming its a crytpo currency. THIS is why people such as myself yell scam when you try to peddle your merchandise.