Cryptocurrency Blog, What Ripple can do for you

What is Ripple? Ripple is a cryptocurrency that was released in 2012 and unlike other cryptocurrencies Ripple is not necessarily decentralized and is owned by a business. The system was created to digitalize transactions bank to bank and speed up the process which in the past had been slow. Ripple allows for bank to bank transactions of BTC and XRP almost instantaniously compared to times before when banks used bank to bank wires which usually took days.

"Ripple does for money what the internet did for information". This analogy is one that caught my attention because it describes how Ripple is allowing money to flow freely making transactions instantaneous just as the internet made information global as well as instantaneous. This is extremely important and beneficial to our current society which is speeding up each and every day due to rapid advances in technologies. This is needed and its not going to change and revert back to the old system. Our current monetary system is slow and not up to par with the rest of our world. With this change coming, banks are going to be losing the power to control people's money and the power is going to go back to the people.

Unlike other cryptocurrencies that are direct competitors of Bitcoin, Ripple acts as a compliment to them and supports them and their users. This is due to their relationship in which Ripple acts as more of a bridge or intermediary between cryptos.

Like all cryptos, Ripple has a limited amount of tokens, but unlike Bitcoin with a maximum of 21 million tokens, Ripple has around 100 billion. On top of this high number, the Ripple company holds and owns roughly 60% of the entire market. This is worrisome to some investors and speculators out there as the company holds enough power to crash the market if they want to or if they don't do that they will benefit from the raise in value from the transaction fees.

When someone uses Ripple in a transaction there is a fee involved just like how banks currently do. However, this fee is much smaller than the fees charged by banks currently. The current fee charged by Ripple is .000001 percent of XRP. This fee rather than being paid to a company instead is subtracted from the market completely and destroyed. That means that with every transaction each token is valued higher than before as there is less and less tokens out there.

Going back to the concerns surrounding Ripple, since the company owns 60% of the tokens in existence, they benefit by each token destroyed by the transactions. Many people due to these factors dismiss and write off Ripple as a scam as it can be manipulated by a governing power. This goes against the main principles that drive investors supporting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Ripple and XRP is an interesting concept and system that offers many benefits to the current monetary system. We have seen sharp growth in this last year and can only assume there will be more as people will begin to realize and learn of these new technologies. Whether Ripple will last and will become a large part of our future monetary system is anyone's guess but as of right now it is benefiting our world and is growing in popularity because of it.