Just because you don't understand how something works does not mean it is not possible to do. ...
I asked you how to verify how many ripples exist and you responded with things like:
and
It looks like about in the right ballpark though, from looking at the distribution of XRP between wallets atm.
This is about the amount held by RippleLabs in their wallets, not the total amount in circulation in the Ripple system. This is like estimating how many BTC are being held by Satoshi. It is about 1 million, give or take, however it is hard to say for sure which address belongs to him. They did not relase a list of addresses that belong to them (which is why I wrote "no further/cryptographically verifiable proof").
How much value do you really think Bitcoin would have today if the blockchain's genesis block was "unavailable"?
Bitcoin operates on a different model (transaction inputs/outputs) and thus needs to be able to track every single coin. Ripple operates on balances, so it does not need full history to work. The situation is not ideal, however as you can see (and verify!) since ledger 32570 the amount of XRP was either stable or has gone down between ledgers, also there is no valid transaction in Ripple to issue new XRP. You can only transfer them or use them as fee (in which case they get destroyed forever).
So once and for all, perhaps Sukrim could clarify: if those earlier ledgers from before #32750 ever appeared, could they prove existence of additional ripples, thus making acoindr's point correct that we currently cannot know how many ripples exist?
Or can there absolutely never be any more ripples than are shown to exist in ledger #32750?
Just so we don't have to go through this back and forth ever again, as I feel like this is at least the third time of seeing it for me even in my short history on bitcointalk.
It would be very unexpected to see that more than 100 billion XRP existed prior to #32570. With current transaction types etc. it is impossible in Ripple to issue more XRP, so the amount in #32570 is the maximum we know about and it is very likely that the total maximum was 100 billion in ledger #0 as advertised (and as any rippled at that time and since then would have produced for a newly bootstrapped system).
It could theoretically be possible that more XRP have existed in these ~2 weeks, however at least at the time of #32570 there were definitely less than that (99999999999.996320 XRP to be exact) in total. SINCE THEN we know exactly how many XRP exist at any point of time, even if for whatever reason another 100 billion XRP existed before and were secretly destroyed before #32570, this does not change the current situation or the future. XRP that are destroyed can not be brought back, so there can absolutely never be more XRP than right now (which is true for every point in time since 1.1.2012).
There have been estimates that if the network gets going, and does what its made to do, it would be realistically valued at $5.00 one day.
...Where?! I do not value all XRP at ~500 billion USD... Feel free to buy whatever you want, speculating on XRP however is not much different than speculating on anything else AND you have a company that is determined to hand out still ~ 7 times the amount of XRP that is currently distributed between users.
If you want to use Ripple, buy ~50 XRP or so (0.001 BTC atm.), if you want to speculate beyond that good luck but it's not something that I personally would do or recommend. Ripple's usefulness is far beyond XRP as cryptocurrency, but that's just my opinion of course.
