And btw the founder that as 17% stake is really a con artist.
XRP is counterparty-free
I have studied their consensus protocol and it is indeed decentralized.
We are planning to use some of the ideas from it in our network.
As for founders having 20% of a startup company, that's common. Look at Mark Zuckerberg for instance. Why does that make them con artists?
Bitcoin whales and Satoshi control 40% of bitcoins while over 99% of the MONEY contributed its market cap came from regular buyerd who came just recently.
You have 100 USD and 100 XRP in your ripple wallet and the gateway you deposited USD to fund your wallet closes shop, you are now left with the bag in the hand and you must trade 'em for another gateway's IOUs, or try to find someone to buy them from you.
> it seems banks are only interested in the Ripple tech
No bank has ever said that. Some have said that they're not using XRP yet, but that's because they're simply beginning trial runs of the technology.
On the other hand, what does Bitcoin have to show? Its community has stagnated and fractured, use-cases have stagnated. As an outsider, it often feels like Bitcoin early adopters are just sitting back and just calling other people stupid.
> XRP, being issued by a company, is less decentralized than many other cryptocurrencies. For instance, Ripple itself holds 61.3 billion XRP, including 55 billion that it keeps in escrow. Only 38.7 billion XRP tokens have been distributed.
> Cofounder and former CEO Chris Larsen, who stepped down in November 2016 and now serves as executive chairman of Ripple, has 5.19 billion XRP in his personal holdings and a 17% stake in the company, according to sources at Ripple. That gives him a net worth of $37.3 billion, using Monday’s exchange rate.