RE: RIPPLE why we should not buy it
Love your passion, man! Let me respond, if I may, having worked with and for some of these banksters over the years.
Banking is a corrupt system, right from the start, and people are only just waking up to it. I'll check out the Malloney videos for sure. Here's a really old site which I still love on the history of banking...
http://www.xat.org/xat/moneyhistory.html
And there are some horribly greedy and corrupt people in the higher echelons of banking. I've met some!
BUT banks are not going away anytime soon. Bear in mind that banks are primarily there to be the front-end of government monetary policy. They're not really there to serve the likes of you and I (though they do make plenty of money from us!) They are, however, being forced into rethinking their business models. They're less likely to be storage and lending facilities down the line, and more like commoditised pipes to move wealth around. That's a good thing for us, though they'll likely fight it tooth and nail.
And there is no doubt the banks are investigating ways of using the blockchain within their own operations. Again, I've met people who are leading those efforts at the likes of HSBC. That's going to happen, is already happening, and not buying Ripple is not going to stop that. That said, I respect your integrity in this matter.
Can I offer a couple of corrections?
First off, no company IPOs at $100,000. That's way too small. And banks don't take 60% in fees!
Second, where do you get the 'print $1, owe $1.50' from? You're right that 98% of money is created as debt, but not at a 50% interest rate! And of course, virtually no money is literally printed these days. Again, around 98% of it exists only digitally, on banks computer ledgers.
Third, you kinda have the right idea about fractional reserve banking, but your figures are out. If I bank $10, yes, they can lend out multiples of that, but it's way over the 10:1 ratio that you mention. Here in the UK, the maximum is 35:1 (though few banks actually go that high).
I'm on the fence about Ripple right now, and I do need to do more research. I bought some recently, just so you know... :-0 Here's a possibly rather naive postulation, though:
Ripple is primarily designed (I think) to facilitate cheaper, faster cross-border inter-bank transactions, which will reduce banks costs. Now, leaving aside the idea of banking cartels (which undoubtedly exist) there is a level of high competition amongst banks. So could it be that Ripple = lower costs to banks = lower fees to customers? May be naive, as I said, but they've been forced to cut credit card fees massively in recent years, as the regulators saw that the relationship between costs to the bank, and fees charged, had gone all out of whack. Their costs had dropped hard but the drops were not being passed on to customers. Now they are, when the regulators forced them to. The same is likely to happen here, as a result of Ripple's work.
As I said I'm on the fence on this one (with a toe into a small Ripple stake!). I'm not defending Ripple, and certainly not defending the banks - I can tell you it's they can look even worse from the inside! - and I completely respect your well-expressed opinion.
I shall follow now, regardless of where this discussion goes.
My thoughts exactly.