We need to talk about Ripple/Swell, Bernanke, the ludicrous fork strategy, and this decentralisation/privacy thing

As a disclaimer, for any of the tiny demographic who may have accidentally found themselves reading my rantings at this point, this post is a bit of a copypasta of some of my rants on various Facebook crypto groups, which I may edit later, but am currently posting 'as-is' mainly for simple labour reasons of typing things more than once. But I feel I want to share some thoughts about this particular zeitgeist in the cryptosphere... etc.

First post is from a thread about Ripple/XRP, and references a story from these here fora.

The prompting question (for disclosure purposes, from an IRL personal friend): "what is your current short to mid-term outlook regarding this? Do you think XLM is poised to achieve a similar value per coin as XRP?"

-- "Worth looking up the story of Jed "Mt. Gox -> Ripple -> FCK/YOU -> Stellar" to get the full history, it's actually a good story. But yeah, with the IBM thing XLM has thrown it's hat in as a potential competitor to XRP. My current personal speculation is that the bankers etc will ultimately want XRP to be closer to the Fiat/FX majors = USD/EUR/GBP, and so its eventual resting place will be somewhere close to those values, probably most closely to USD, for the simple fact that banks will not want to fuck around looking up how many billions 0.000413 Satoshis is. So I think with the IBM thing there is a chance XLM could end up around there as well, and at present it's only 0.04c. Both will likely grow more slowly than the others, because their whole point is to be more stable for these reasons, and probably won't "moon" (although I do think there could be a spike or two before they settle down if you can position yourself to take profit at the right time). But the other side of that *coin* (see what I did there?) is that when you look at that bigger picture it will undoubtedly have a knock on effect on all the others, no least BTC. My intuition is telling me — long term — Bitcoin will be on a par with Gold, and the price may even match whatever gold is at when this all plays out and settles down. Probably a lot less than it is now. But Gold could spike too if this major collapse everyone is expecting happens. Either way, at 0.20c per XRP and .04c XLM, I'm watching both very closely and buying as much as I can spare of both.

For the sake of balance: https://www.xrpchat.com/topic/5051-debunked-fckyou-on-april-2

I have no idea if it's true, but like Chopper Read said: never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Then another post in the same thread, responding to a question about Ripple:

"Ignore it at your peril is my answer. Honestly, I think the fact that Ben Bernanke was a keynote speaker was a MASSIVE signal that, far from the rhetorical idealistic idea that the bankers are 'scared of Bitcoin' or whatever, they are very much interested in the technologies and WILL do their own version, and it will be backed by state violence and the propaganda system, and very large numbers of people who know nothing about Bitcoin or whatever will just go along with the government approved currencies that you can pay your taxes with, and defer to authority. In other words, I think XRP is going to be most valuable to the banks etc in the immediate term because it has the most potential to be relatively stable, which is crucial for a currency, and so far Bitcoin has shown it can drop 40% in a couple of days, which if you get down to brass tacks means everything became 40% more expensive if you were trying to buy it with BTC. Yeah it went back up, but that doesn't help the guy who needs to buy a loaf of bread on that day to eat — in other words, basically like Bernanke effectively said, BTC is useless as a currency people can live on and rely on, and if it can't be controlled and centralised, governments will never "allow" it long term. That doesn't mean they will shut off the internet to stop it, just that they'll make it clear to the vast majority of people who know nothing about it and/or don't give that much of a fuck, that BTC is the one for drug dealers and murderers, but they can trust the Dollar Coin or whatever to not make everything cost 40% more tomorrow. So the ones that can provide that stability will be the successful ones, and so far the only one that seems close to that is XRP. Not saying they will all disappear, but the privacy ones etc will be kind of forced underground, and the bubble of the whole thing will pop and go back to more realistic long term levels to match. I think we still have time, but I think it's probably wise to think about these longer term probabilities when making decisions about what you think will or won't "moon"."

Follow up Q&A about privacy coins + value:

[[response from my friend who {I assume probably ;-) } won't mind me quoting (aptly) anonymously]: "But the ones that truly master the anonymity and security factor will always be in demand, surely.... even if the world gets comfy with a ManCoin such as XRP, The Man is always gonna want control at the end of the day though, and it is in contradiction to a lot of the core values that people in this space hold. Perhaps the true value and potential of privacy coins, specifically, is nowhere near close to being realised at the present moment."]

"Yeah, but I mean you'll probably have to either just trade them as trading instruments on exchanges, or if you want to spend them it will be more dark web — not that I'm that sure that won't be forced to grow substantially also, with all the data retention laws etc. Privacy will be definitely be increasingly valuable. But by definition they are cutting out a major chunk of market volume (i.e. all those billions of people who have no real idea what it is and will just go with the easy and reliable "man" option), so the value will have to drop, just because liquidity. Taking the "brass tacks" point, the lowest common denominator is that the vast majority of people will probably not want to be bothered with this level of complexity. But for me one of the most exciting things about it is that it offers access to currency trading to a lot of people who would never have thought about trading fx or stocks etc., and not realised there is potential there to use the markets to increase their quality of life. And I reckon that bit will stay. My personal view is Bitcoin will not be a currency people use to buy things, any more than you'd take a gold ring in to a bakery and chip off a little bit of it to buy some bread.

 "^I had to laugh today, I watched ABC News24 business today and they did a report about the 1987 market crash, and how many people are saying the conditions now are eerily like they were just before it. Then the guy said how BHP and Rio Tinto and Crown Casino stocks are down, then mentioned casually that the highest gains were Dominos Pizza and a wine company. I thought that told volumes about what the people in the stock markets are thinking. The cheapest pizza company and a wine company are their current bets on what the most successful companies will be in the immediate future. Don't know about you, but to me that says they expect people to be spending a lot of money on cheap shitty pizza and wine, and not big blue chip mining companies."

On Stellar:

"With news like that you'd be insane not to just get 1000 or so at .04c ... at VERY least they are effectively competing with Ripple, which is even more meaningful with the Jed "Mt. Gox -> Ripple -> FCK/YOU -> Stellar" story attached to it. If they are going to be a competitor of Ripple then they will probably want slow and steady stability, so they might not go moon, but .04c is surely massively under value. This news could be a big deal."

On Etherium:

"... many of these coins might end up assets/instruments for traders more like the stock market. And the Etherium style 'platform' smart contract type ones are kind of something else altogether, so I'm still not sure what TF to make of Etherium. It's wrong to call it a currency. It's almost like calling Linux a currency. There's just too much you can do with it, and it has an entire eco-system built on top of it, which makes it seem massively undervalued. But that also feels partly because it can't be compared to currencies because it's a different thing. Either way, I will always have some Eth"

... and the forks, & Etherium:

"ultimately [Bitcoin] was the first and original, but is definitely not the best. This fork idea is sadly probably actually not even just a stupid attempt at improving it, but quite cynically plain greed and opportunism. Like, the only reason I can come up with is they will be leeching off the 'Bitcoin brand' and printing free money. There is no other good reason for these forks that can't be solved exponentially better on the Etherium platform, or countless others that are already building on that. And the only reason I can come up with that ETH is not way higher is because it's not really a currency, but a whole eco-system. So trying to value it like a currency kind of makes as much sense as trying to value Unix or Linux as currencies. I'm still really not sure what to make of Etherium. But I'll definitely always make sure I have some."

More on the un-usability of Bitcoin:

[Anon response]: "was just wondering, after reading your first comment.. let's say you want to buy a weapon that costs 1 btc.
If btc value drops 40% in one day, does that mean you'll get the weapon 40% cheaper ?
Or is there a system in place that adjusts the prices to be always relative to the actual value / sell price of the item in USD.

"no that's exactly my point. You would either have to pay 40% more for that 'weapon' (I prefer to focus on loaves of bread, personally ;-) ) or you buy it before it drops, then the guy you bought it off suddenly got 40% less for it. Like — it won't take that long before people start figuring this out once they start trying to use it more full time as a currency. I fear there could be more Seppuku going on in Japan when that happens a few more times, as they've all embraced it so warmly. They are a good test case, so worth following that closely."

"In other words, so far the only reason it's actually been possible for anyone anywhere to use Bitcoin to actually buy things is because it's been in this crazy permanent growth bull run for so long now, people are assuming it will actually be worth even more by they time they go to spend it. But no market of any kind works that way — they all have their bear runs and retrace. But Bitcoin is doing that to ridiculous extremes. I mean — If the USD dropped by 40% that fast it would be like the great depression and would take years to recover. It shows resilience, but it also shows that people maybe aren't fully realising what it means to have your money potentially drop by 40% overnight, and once people start realising that major flaw, then they might lose a bit of faith because the hope that it would one day take over as a real currency has been a big part of its (over) valuation.