Topic: Say bye to ripple, prepare to say bye to litecoin (Read 7278 times)

YOU make a rational prediciton upon the future of LTC then, right the fuck now, with current knowledge.

I'll be there in half a year to call you out on it and laugh at you.

Yawn.

Great prediction.

There is no doubt that Ripple is going to be succesful despite its drawback, but I still believe that a competitor will come, and that both currencies are going to compete against each other.

Ripple in many ways does seem as the perfect cryptocurrency, except for its distribution method and its supply, which should be multiplied by 100, so as to be usable up to the smallest transactions with a market capitalization of greater than 70 trillion current US dollars, given that the world is undergoing the phase of searching for the most ideal currency, a significant portion of the world still needs to industrialize, productivity can further increase by allowing unlike now for the free market to work, and productivity can increase even further through technology improvements.

You can use your analysis to make an investment decision - it's a free market. You have all the facts, as does everyone else.

The problem is even worse, as the founders, employees, and investors are going to hold at least 50% of all XRPs.

Quite frankly I view such a business model as being disgusting. If they wanted so desperately to make money they should have created a distribution method based on misterbigg's idea, https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/decentralized-xrp-distribution-147700, or something better, and invested and mined it early on while not trying to monopolize it, instead of premining it and trying to convince the rest of the people that this is a great idea.

I sincerely hope that once it is open sourced, a competitor with a better distribution method is going to be developed.

Also, the argument that Bitcoin is just as centralized doesn't hold. Ripple is significantly more centrally held than Bitcoin when comparing the founders, employees, and investors of OpenCoin with the early adopters of Bitcoin.

It's a scam the same way Bitcoin is a scam, depending of how you look at it, either all the way or not at all.

It's a scam if they manipulate the currency supply or for something else?

They clearly have a long term business model - and I don't doubt the price of xrp plays a big role in this - but they have to reach a point of critical mass, where a good portion of the world's population have enough ripples to do business on ripple.
They are currently taking advantage of bitcoin users who are used to these cryptocurrencies (we enjoy playing this game) - they are using us as guinea pigs (and it's costing us more than a guinea).
Once we build their system with our involvement, and attract more users into an increasingly useful money transfer system, they will start to impart pressure on the value of xrp in order to make it trivial for Joe to enter this payment system.
They will manipulate the currency supply to their hearts content so as to maximize their long term profits.

(I've just persuaded myself that ripple is a scam. But a very useful scam that may change everything.)

You forgot it was developed by a for profit company, and they have held onto 25% of all XRP for themselves.

Your name speaks for the type of judgment you made. Threads like these have been made since the start if altcoins, and guess what? They're still here. The Litecoin part reminds of all the threads that were going on in December 2011 and nearly all of 2012.

You're rejecting the gold to silver analogy and substituting a real estate analogy?

How about this: No analogies apply at all, because cryptocurrency is unlike anything that has ever existed before?

Yes and no, yes they will give away quite a bunch, but at which rate?
I agree that current market prices are influenced by the sub sequential reduction of the rate they are given away on the forum. And once there is another giveaway prices might drop.

Now the assumption that the average joe won't use ripple unless it's gratis is flawed.
Think of this of how Second Life works: Linden Dollars are both traded on the market and supplied by Linden labs, the most straight-forward way to do this is for opencoin to sell XRP via credit card.
There would also be third party sites which sell them at a semi-fixed rate just like coinlab does.

But you can't use ripple unless you have xrp - they have to give it away. You can't buy ripples unless you have ripples already.
No average Joe will use ripple if Ripple don't give them free xrp.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. How else is OpenCoin going to make money besides holding XRPs and hoping they go up in value? Once the server code is open sourced, they will have no control over the network.

It's their financing model though so don't expect they won't charge for the rain of confetti. Plus the way to lower the barrier of entry already has been established: Lowering the XRP fees instead of flooding the market with additional ones.

Buying xrp is not the same as buying shares in Ripple - they already have their own business arrangements involving real money with their backers.
You think the venture capitalists exchanged their millions of dollars for xrp?

The value of xrp has nothing to do with the value of Ripple as a payment system.
xrp could be worth 1c per 100000xrp and Ripple would still work as a payment system.

They are almost certainly going to release massive amounts of xrp to reduce the price of xrp to make entry into the ripple system as cheap as possible.
No one will use Ripple if xrp becomes hard to obtain. They will throw xrp around like confetti.

Ripple has some major venture capital millions of dollars backing it.  Don't sell it short...well maybe the current price is unsustainable but then again it could run up higher. I like it though.

I didn't invest in it, I just didn't sell my free XRP and I won't sell them at least till ripple comes out of beta. I think that once ripple is up and running XRP will be the first bitcoin alternative to exceed it in market capitalization.  (It already does if you account for the XRP still hold by opencoin)
If prices go below 1BTC/100k I will probably buy a bunch though.

True, myspace was beaten by facebook. Network effects aren't everything and can work in reverse too! But as you say correctly facebook was better. Better interface, cooler clientele, but also better tools and apps, more options, and far superior marketing (everyone that signed up and 'searched friends' via their email account would send automatically a personalized email invitation to all those people to join facebook too). The setup was also very different, myspace was public personalized webpages, whereas facebook was a private network.  

Litecoin does not offer such great improvements over bitcoin. You are hammering on a single advantage in favor of Litecoin 'faster transactions'. By your own admission you say that the value of this is limited as it's also not fast enough for realtime transactions. I've read also many counterarguments that Bitcoin does not allow realtime transactions. Satoshi Dice offers realtime transactions with bitcoin. And for smaller transactions with merchants in the street the risk of not waiting for a single confirmation is acceptable.

I'm sorry but I think, just like facebook did, Litecoin will have to offer much more value/advantages in order for it to even be able to build a niche market, let alone take over bitcoin.

Litecoin today lives at the mercy of speculators. And I think speculators that bid up Litecoin and believe in it long term, will pay dearly for letting hope/greed instead of rational evaluation guide their decisions. I would advise strongly to also listen to your sceptical/fear part, now that you still can lock in most of the value.

I might be totally wrong and will continue to follow this thread in search for better arguments in favor of Litecoin.

The problem with Ripple is that OpenCoin could be raided by the feds and then XRP are worth NOTHING.

Also, it isnt mined - and it isnt even close to being scarce. Its made by a FOR_PROFIT_PRIVATE_COMPANY. They have one goal. MAKE MONEY.

BTC and LTC dont have these problems...