Escrowed or not? It's in the hands of a single company who created them out of thin air, how does this differ from a central bank printing fiat out of thin air?
You're confusing the ripple protocol (which might be adopted bigtime by banks) with the ripple tokens (the things you're buying of which you think they will be used by banks). I thought this whole crypto-thing was about cutting out the middlemen enriching themselves, not enriching the same middlemen even more? I must be too oldschool to comprehend :-)
How you mean 'useless in real life'? You mean you can't transact with it? Do you think gold is useless in real life? Sure, nobody uses it to transact with, but people who owned gold instead of dollars to save are way way way better off... So describing it as useless is very subjective...
Might surpass bitcoin and might make you paper profits, but you'll pay in freedom and future for you and your children
best of luck,
Well, it is (escrowed): 1B XRP are released on the market each month, I've seen it this month and in december also (don't know about before that, as I didn't knew about XRP before early december.
The difference between XRP and fiat is that Ripple or anyone can't produce any more XRP than today's supply. If anything, the total existing amount of XRP is slowly decreasing over time as a tiny fraction of XRP is destructed with each transaction (even if the XRP destructed each day is really meaningless, and doesn't really impact the market, it could be increased later, but I'm not sure it will have a significant impact even in the long term)
I don't confuse them at all, though I do believe XRP will be used by banks if they start adopting the ripple protocol. Simply because it's the most logical choice from a cost perspective.
You can't compare bitcoin to gold. BTC is way more volatil. Gold is considered a safe value, BTC price can rise or drop by 20%+ overnight. Also, what I mean is it does not have a REAL-LIFE utility. Sure, you can earn some bucks investing, but that's all.
Also, the anticapitalist speech I hear coming from people that speculate on Altcoin/Bitcoin makes me smirk a little. Like, if you trade or hold cryptos to sell them someday and make profit, then you make money out of your capital, not your work. I don't see in what it is different than what banks do. (I don't judge, I do it myself, and I consider that the risk you take with your own money partly justify the earning -even if it doesn't justify earning that much money in my opinion-)
What people that are in the game for a long time seem to fail to see it's that, at the end of the day, it's not about the philosophy behind the coin, it's about its real utility and, for the investor, it's about the money you can make and the risk you take . If it wasn't, there woudn't have so much shitcoins outta here.
People that are coming in right now are not here because of the philosophy behind BTC. People in general don't really care (95% of people don't even know what BTC really is) and I think you have to take this new wave into account if you don't wan't to get burn.
Thinking that BTC is going to change the world is a utopia. I'm not betting my money on unrealistic dreams. My children probably won't be freer than I am, but I certainly will be able to feed them and pay for their studies. That's a start.
PS : sorry for my probably poor english, I'm french and tired :p