The Fed Construct Known as Ripple - The Blockchain Trojan Horse

January 11, 2019

Part I of II

From Wikipedia, TROJAN HORSE:

The Trojan Horse is a story from the Trojan War about the subterfuge that the Greeks used to enter the independent city of Troy and win the war. In the canonical version, after a fruitless 10-year siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid a select force of men inside including Odysseus. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the wooden horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.

In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks). The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad. Episodes from the war provided material for Greek tragedy and other works of Greek literature, and for Roman poets including Virgil and Ovid.

The ancient Greeks believed that Troy was located near the Dardanelles and that the Trojan War was a historical event of the 13th or 12th century BC, but by the mid-19th century AD, both the war and the city were widely seen as non-historical.

The Fed

To have a solid understanding of today’s global financial markets and the various financial instruments traded in aggregate in the billions of dollars each day, one should have a firm understanding of who controls the levers of power within the global geo-political system, for without this knowledge, it is difficult to understand how global financial markets truly operate and are manipulated on a daily basis.

The Federal Reserve of the United States is an institution that is in control of the U.S. government as it possesses the unique ability to print - at will and without restraint - the world’s global reserve currency, the U.S. dollar.

When referring to the Fed in this article, I refer to the top bankers, military and intelligence officers (NSA and CIA), bureaucrats (such those in the SEC and CFTC) and politicians who eagerly play their part within the U.S. government and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex to wage war against the world and sustain its dominance over it.

The Fed has used obvious lies such as 9-11 to justify the murder of millions of innocent people around the world in such countries as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam, and Yemen.

The Fed and its backers destroyed countries such as Libya and Syria simply because they felt like it and justified their atrocities with their fabricated lies of a “War on Terror.”

Video link of America’s Lie on Terror:

Columbia University Professor on the False Reasons of the Syrian War.

Trump ends Project “Timber Sycamore” – a covert operation to arm and fund Syrian militants brought in by the CIA, NSA, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

i) https://www.mintpressnews.com/trump-ends-timber-sycamore-covert-cia-program-arm-syria-rebels/229970/

ii) https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html

When referring to the Fed, I refer to all the bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and employees of the NSA, CIA and the U.S. Military Industrial Complex who simply do not care about being part of a regime that murders innocent people around the world to allow the continuation of a life back home in the U.S. that guarantees retirement before the age of 60; and until death, a generous inflation-adjusted monthly pension with full medical and dental benefits.

Prescott Bush, senior partner and president of Wall Street giant Brown Brothers Harriman, founded with Wall Street insiders such as the Dulles Brothers the CIA after WWII. In the above picture, Prescott Bush inspects his young California congressional candidate for the House of Representatives, Richard Nixon, future congressman and president of the United States. In 1970, during Nixon's presidency, he would appoint George Bush, Prescott Bush's son, as ambassador to the U.N. after his failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat representing Texas.

Prescott’s son, George H.W. Bush, is appointed as the Director of the CIA in 1976 as a supposed “outsider” and becomes acting president in 1981 after Ronald Reagan is shot 60 days into his presidency. Reagan is shot by a lone-gunman named John Hinckley, whose family had close documented relationships with the Bush family prior to the shooting of President Reagan.

https://whowhatwhy.org/2016/08/16/bush-angle-reagan-shooting-still-unresolved-hinckley-walks/

“CIA employees had every reason to be suspicious of this untutored outsider who. . . had spent a lot of time in partisan politics. . .But this Agency gave me their trust from day one.”

– George H.W. Bush, an obvious joke of a comment at CIA HQs, 1999, by the son of the man who was instrumental in creating the CIA, Prescott Bush.

It would seem that if the people controlling and working for the Fed are more than willing to murder innocent people around the world in the millions so they can continue gorging themselves from the trough of free-money from the Fed, these same people would be more than willing to come up with a fake cryptocurrency - a Trojan Horse such as Ripple - to subvert the emergence of a new technology such as blockchain and Bitcoin that has the potential of becoming a viable alternative (at least in part) to the U.S. dollar as a global currency.

Background - Before Researching Ripple – Other Coins

For the past two months or so, I have been looking into the blockchain project Ripple. Unlike other blockchain projects that I researched, Ripple is rather odd.

Prior to Ripple, I reviewed a number of blockchain projects that interested me such as: Cardano; EOS; Ethereum; and Zcash. I wanted to get a better understanding of what blockchain is by studying some of the leading projects in this new field that Harvard Business Review labels a transformational technology.

https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain

I discovered that many of the founders of the leading blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Cardano, EOS and Ethereum worked together from the earliest days when Satoshi Nakamoto first published in 2009 his seminal Bitcoin whitepaper revolutionizing the ability to transfer wealth directly over the internet without a third-party intermediary.

Charles Hoskinson and Vitalik Buterin played key roles in creating the first programmable blockchain platform Ethereum, which allowed decentralized blockchain games such as CryptoKitties – not an earth-shattering feat, but it was at least a start.

Dan Larimer was the primary architect and engineer for three highly-successful blockchain projects: BitShares, Steemit, and EOS. Dan’s discussions with Satoshi Nakamoto in the early days of Bitcoin are well documented. Dan pursued his own ideas concerning blockchain, including the blockchain algorithm he named “Graphene” that is used in both BitShares and Steemit. Dan also created the Delegated Proof of Stake Algorithm (DPOS) which powers EOS and allows EOS to be a non-Proof-of-Work-based blockchain platform.

Dan Larimer's father is Stan Larimer, who was a Boeing engineer, and with whom Dan founded Cryptonomex Inc., a blockchain technology consulting business. Dan received his Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science from Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science, where he currently serves as a guest lecturer and curriculum advisor.

Charles Hoskinson worked together with Dan Larimer in the pioneering days of blockchain and studied advanced mathematics - specifically, analytic number theory at the Metropolitan State University of Denver and the University of Colorado Boulder. Charles was the first CEO of Ethereum, but quickly split with the young developers at Ethereum headed by Vitalik Buterin, a child prodigy in mathematics and computer science.

After Ethereum, Charles launched a third-generation cryptocurrency, Cardano, that has a global team of contributing software engineers from some of the leading computer science research institutions in the world. The software engineers that launched the Cardano platform were recruited by Charles Hoskinson and his partners at IOHK, the management company of Cardano.

Over the past two years, I also discovered the interesting history behind Zcash. This privacy coin project was created by an impressive development team of cryptography and computer science experts from some of the most respected research universities in the world such as: MIT, Johns Hopkins University, UC Berkeley, Technion Institute of Israel, and Tel Aviv University.

Research of Zcash led me to learn about one of the most advanced cryptography fields today: zk-snarks. Many of the leading zk-snarks experts in the world, all with Phd’s in computer science or mathematics work for Zcash and implement the most advanced mathematics and cryptography in Zcash’s software – unlike Ripple.

Similarly, Cardano has some of the leading global experts in their respective fields working with them, such as Prof. Philip Wadler of the University of Edinburgh, one of the three co-creators of the leading functional programming language, Haskell.

Cardano is based on Haskell, and the person who helped create Haskell works closely with Cardano, IOHK and Charles Hoskinson.

Unlike non-functional programming languages such as C++ that utilize manual testing, Haskell is a computer programming language based on advanced mathematics - Lambda Calculus. Programs written in functional programming languages, such as Haskell can be tested, automatically, to provide a high assurance of security and robustness. Haskell is becoming increasingly popular in industries that simply cannot afford software crashes or glitches such as the aeronautics industry where human lives are at risk or the banking industry where billions of dollars can be lost.

Wadler received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1977, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984.

The Odd Case that is Ripple

The primary reason for mentioning these other leading cryptocurrencies is to show the impressive development teams behind these leading blockchain projects, i.e., Cardano, EOS and Z-Cash. No matter your interest level in these projects, it is without question there are very impressive development teams behind many blockchain projects – most of these development teams are full of Phd’s in computer science and are professors at some of the top universities in the world.

However, in the odd case that is Ripple - not a single expert in computer science or cryptography was a part of Ripple’s supposed genesis team that created a leading-edge blockchain platform from scratch in 2012.

This lack of technical expertise in Ripple’s genesis team is beyond odd.

Ripple is an odd project that has as its CTO and claimed cryptography expert a person with zero formal training in computer science or cryptography - a first in the cryptocurrency space. While other blockchain projects have industry pioneers such as Dan Larimer or Charles Hoskinson, or professors with numerous Google Scholar Citations, Ripple has David Schwartz with zero credentials in the core technologies that are essential for a blockchain platform – cryptography and computer science.

Another in a long stream of highly positive articles in the main stream media since Ripple’s launch in 2012, this time Forbes Magazine – an “Editor’s Pick” in fact. Ripple is the only blockchain project that is given positive MSM press coverage – all other cryptocurrencies are denigrated into the same space as Bitcoin which is often compared to “rat poison squared” by MSM shills.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2018/09/04/ripples-trillion-dollar-man/#314034057324

Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, who admittedly worked for the NSA (again, he worked for the NSA) and also goes by the alias JoelKatz* graduated from the University of Houston with an electrical engineering undergraduate degree, which usually qualifies one to be a developer of computer hardware such as phones or automotive engine controllers, or safety systems such as air-bags or air-conditioners. For the most part, electrical engineers are not required to study computer programming or computer science – it is not a requisite for an electrical engineering degree. No other blockchain designated “expert” in any leading blockchain project has only a degree in electrical engineering – David Schwartz or JoelKatz, whatever his real name is – is the only one.

• On a side note of yet another Ripple Oddity - the reason I know of David Schwartz’s pen name JoelKatz is because almost every public-relations puff piece on Ripple and David Schwartz mentions this odd story of his blog and his chosen fake name. His blog was started in 2016, and David supposedly spent a considerable amount of time writing blog posts about general nonsense and nontechnical issues in-between being the lead cryptographer, programmer and architect for Ripple.

David, or whoever wrote his blog, wrote about odd things.

Take a look at another Ripple Oddity where David just writes about being a genuine person with a real Bitcoin address. It’s a bit odd like so many other things with Ripple.

https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@joelkatz/i-m-david-schwartz-knows-as-joelkatz-chief-cryptographer-at-ripple

https://www.distributedagreement.com/

The only degree David has is an electrical engineering degree from the University of Houston, a degree which requires low-level math and an introductory computer science class. Creating complex cryptographically secure blockchain platforms requires a very strong understanding of advanced mathematics and computer science - David has neither of these. This lack of expertise by Ripple’s current CTO is more than odd - like so many other odd parts that is Ripple.

Ripple’s Supposed Genesis Story

Ripple was supposedly started from a chance meeting between Jed McCaleb the current CEO of Stellar and David Schwartz Ripple’s current CTO at a random unnamed coffee shop. During their chance meeting in 2011, the two started to discuss, supposedly, in their first chance meeting what was to become the core technology of Ripple.

Born in 1975, Jed McCaleb, who dropped out of UC Berkeley around 1990 without a degree, started in 2000 a copycat website of Napster called eDonkey in the last dying days of the dot-com bubble era. By 2006, eDonkey was shut down due to a successful lawsuit by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) that forced eDonkey to pay RIAA US$30 million in damages and shut its doors.

After Jed’s unsuccessful foray into the music industry, Jed launched in 2007 the domain Mtgox.com with the intent to create a trading site for Magic: The Gathering trading cards. After three years of not getting anywhere selling fantasy play cards over the internet, at the end of 2010 Jed repositioned Mtgox.com as a Bitcoin exchange. After setting up the exchange and only after a couple of months being a Bitcoin exchange site, Jed sold Mt.Gox to Mark Karpelès, who infamously crashed the company by allowing the biggest hack to date of Bitcoin with 850,000 Bitcoin stolen – which, at today’s value, is worth over US$3 billion.

So, in summary, the two individuals who are credited with creating Ripple are an electrical engineer from the University of Houston and a college dropout who had the misfortune of starting a failed music pirating website, followed up with starting the biggest failure in Bitcoin’s short history.

Both of these individuals have no background in the key technologies that are essential to blockchain technology.

What is still taking years for world renowned experts in mathematics and computer science to create a secure and efficient blockchain platform, took these two rank amateurs only a year after meeting, by pure chance at an unnamed coffee shop, to create one of the largest blockchain platforms today – so goes the rather implausible genesis story of Ripple.

No other top blockchain project, except of course Stellar, has such unqualified individuals as their supposed creators and core developers.

This ridiculous genesis story of Ripple is simply utter nonsense – as nonsensical as two planes on 9-11 supposedly causing three skyscrapers in lower Manhattan to crash symmetrically straight down at near free-fall speed.

The other people credited with creating Ripple, such as Chris Larsen studied international business and accounting at San Francisco University and Brad Garlinghouse studied economics at the University of Kansas. There is a third person who supposedly helped start Ripple, Arthur Britto.

As stated by a writer on an XRP Chat post:

So who is Arthur Britto II? It is hilariously difficult to find out for someone who is so prominent in the development of such a prominent Internet network. There are no photos purporting to be him in social media, traditional media coverage, or Ripple publicity. Octogenarians with physical storefronts for their business have more online visibility than him.

https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/26914-how-to-disappear-completely-in-re-arthur-britto-ii/

We are to believe that in this day and age of the internet, Arthur Britto, a supposed founding member of Ripple and at times, in some publications at least, credited with writing the core code of Ripple with David Schwartz, has no internet presence whatsoever – this is yet another oddity of Ripple.

In short, Ripple’s genesis story is an unmitigated nonsensical giant pile of b.s.

-- continued in Part II --

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@temujinx/phvo5-the-fed-construct-known-as-ripple-the-blockchain-trojan-horse