It's not a cryptocurrency in the sense that it is centralized and pre-mined by a central authority who could mine even more whenever it feels like it just like fiat. Still, it's an improvement on swift if it succeeds but that would not be a "cryptocurrency success" in my opinion.

Personally I think it would be considered a success, swift sucks, ACH sucks - Ripple giving us a way to apply a lot of the benefits a decentralized cryptocurrency purports to provide (cheap, fast transactions) would be wonderful.

Hell, I would love if I could track payment remits through Ripple someday - stop dealing with the terrible EDI formats our bank dumps to us on a daily basis and just monitor the blockchain. We could have knowledge about payments in real-time AND have a much saner time dealing with them.

slightly offtopic: But I am currently building a ACH parser and I am shocked the banking system works at all.

I think since it uses digital signatures to send the transactions it's a cryptocurrency. It's not a decentralized one sure.

It uses a distributed consensus algorithm to validate transactions. Anyone can run a validator node, and there are many companies/institutions out there doing that (Microsoft, MIT, etc).

The key property of Ripple you have to understand is that the consensus is decided by a set of nodes controlled by the Ripple team and their partners, and those nodes don't care about the opinion of any other node that's not on their whitelist. Everyone else just listens to what they decide the consensus is and follows along. While in theory you could listen to a different set of nodes, it'd be daft to: if those nodes ever come to a different consensus than the default nodes then you're screwed, and who you trust has no effect on who the default nodes listen to or how their consensus is formed.

They have no reason to use XRP though, they could just use the technology to launch their own token.

Yes, they can use any currency or crypto with the technology, but there still is a transaction cost. Using XRP will lower that by 30%.

>but there still is a transaction cost.

And that will be higher if they're using the same token that the general public are speculating on.

How Ripple could succeed but XRP be worth nothing

https://publication.widmerdun.com/how-ripple-could-succeed-b...

People are going to get rekt

As far as I'm aware, there is not use of XRP as of now. There's a difference between Ripple the company and Ripple the centralized blockchain, which many fail to realize.

To expand upon that: many people buying Ripple/XRP the coin believe (falsely) they are buying shares of Ripple the company. I found [0] helpful.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Ripple/comments/6jd9w6/this_is_the_...

From a Fortune article about this [1]:

> The partnership will see MoneyGram pilot the use of XRP through a new Ripple service, called xRapid

So there is usage of XRP.

[1] http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/ripple-moneygram-xrp-cryptocur...

Note the use of the future tense in your quote, while who you were responding to spoke to the present.

Cuallix is actively using XRP. Get your facts straight, cowboy!

Do you have any proof that the global banking “cartel” is using Ripple? Why would they want to use some third party company they have no control over, with participation of the general public, for a solution to a problem that they didn’t think was a big enough issue to address earlier, and that they could create a proprietary, private solution for?

You should do some research on ripple and some of their customers. Huge global banks are already using their software.

Really?

Which ones?

I saw the tweets from their CEO and it actually sounded very much like the emperor has no clothes.

If the best examples of "huge global banks" that Ripple can produce when asked are a couple of small-time national banks suggesting they'll trial the software later this year then I'll reserve judgement.

Yes, whatever the Bilderberg lizard people truly in power decide upon. It's all in plain sight if people would just stop drinking the tap water and wake up.