A Deep Dive Into Ripple & XRP

CBDCs, Ripple = XRP, GreenPeace and Bitcoin

There’s a lot a hubbub going around the interwebs (again) about XRP and their situationship with bitcoin. I hope for this write-up to serve as an aggregation of information and nexus of source material for those wishing to both gain understanding of what XRP (“Ripple”) was, is, and how the crypto token and the company have a relationship with Bitcoin.

Genesis

A friend of mine from Clubhouse and Twitter, who also happens to be a lawyer with explicit and long-standing experience in the crypto space, Preston Byrne, has discussed the Ripple XRP topic ad nauseam. As many have. And yet the facts and evidence continue to go unacknowledged.

Ripple Labs Inc.,” (2013) previously named “Opencoin Inc.,” (2013) which was previously named “Newcoin Inc.,” (2012).

As noted by Preston,

“Anything done by Newcoin/Opencoin/Ripple Labs (CA) was done by a direct predecessor of the current Ripple entity that runs the business. All those names refer to the same company. For the sake of [this] analysis, therefore, each of the four names should be treated as if they refer to the same enterprise.”

The Ripple Software

The Ripple software was gifted to Newcoin/Opencoin/Ripple Labs/Ripple by Arthur Britto. With a statement that any future contributions by Britto (or others) would be done so in an open-source format.

The number of tokens in existence (referred to as “credits” in the paperwork), were agreed to be anticipated (as pointed out by Byrne, did not exist at the time of the agreement being drafted and signed) as totaling to be 100 billion in count. With an agreement to allow Britto to maintain a 2% ownership of the total supply, accounting for potential increased dilution in the future. At the time of writing the XRP token was not conceived but was later named XRP.

Preston has put together a phenomenal deepdive on the ownership and business relations of Ripple/Ripple Labs, Inc./Opencoin, Inc./Newcoin, Inc. and I do not want to risk even the slightest confusion of who has done the work. For the nittygritty on the topics such as Copyright and the like, I suggest visiting Preston’s own writing by clicking the image above or following the hyperlink here.

XRP IS Centralized

80% of the total supply of the XRP token was provided to the company for use at the company’s discretion — what is known as a premine. With 55% of the allocation getting locked up into escrow accounts that release every month.

“The escrow consists of independent on ledger escrows that release a total of one billion XRP each month over the next 55 months.” [Source]

If XRP were truly decentralized, why are over 30,000 blocks missing??

Ripple’s Use Case

According to this 2014 article published in The Banker, Mr. Larsen suggests that Ripple would be a “currency agnostic” system for transferring ‘conventional’ fiat currencies. That XRP would be the basis for an ‘internet of value.’ Unfortunately for Ripple, in 2023 the Federal Reserve announced FedNow going live.

What Larsen couldn’t have expected at the time was the development of the Lightning Network to facilitate the ‘internet of value’ and was the enabler for the development of NOSTR — which has multiple social media functions, including streaming. The Lightning Network went live in 2018, with gains in use and popularity growing between 2020 and 2021.

CBDCs — Ripple’s New Use Case

“Moving money on the CBDC Private Ledger will be cost-effective, reliable and close to instantaneous. Transactions can also happen at volumes required by Central Banks. The CBDC Private Ledger will handle tens of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) initially with the potential to scale to hundreds of thousands TPSs over time.

Transactions on the CBDC Private Ledger are verified by the same consensus protocol used by the XRP Ledger, which is far less energy intensive, and therefore less expensive and 61,000 times more efficient than public blockchains that leverage proof-of-work.

In addition to leveraging the XRP Ledger technology, the CBDC Private Ledger is also supported by RippleNet technologies, and the Interledger suite of protocols to enable ultra-high throughput use-cases such as micro-payments.

The CBDC Private Ledger meets even the highest of security standards for Central Banks with each having complete sovereignty and ability to customize based on their own unique privacy and policy requirements. The core technology behind this new CBDC Private Ledger has been running for more than 8 years without incident and with billions of dollars of value transacted everyday.”

Then Ripple partnered with Palau to pilot their CBDC program starting in 2021, 7 months after the above posting. With Phase 2 of the Palau Project progressing in 2023.

Ripple claimed to have 10 countries onboard with its CBDC project during summer of 2024.

I have had numerous conversations with individuals on Twitter over the years that claim to be against CBDCs and the over centralization of financial power and economic surveillance YET THEY LOVE XRP AND RIPPLE. I mean are you insane, or just re[dacted]? I have provided evidence, from the horse’s mouth, that Ripple is pushing the development of CBDC’s forward. A patently anti-liberty initiative.

Political Interference

My man Pierre Rochard popped a shot at Garlinghouse and Ripple recently stating that regulation is being held up, not because of bitcoin but because of Ripple’s obfuscation of understanding via their tomfoolery with political lobbying efforts. On a similar point is Ripple’s funding of blockchain research at prominent universities to the tune of $50 million — an effective manipulation tactic made evident by revelations over actual climate and environmental data challenging activists that have been screaming for decades that we would most assuredly be burning up (or drowning) due to ‘Global Warming.’ A story that has persisted since the 70s but has not yielded any actual evidence that holds water.

Ripple Labs — Energy and Climate Experts?

Ripple has been attacking bitcoin for years in a clever, but still laughable, strategy — climate change and climate catastrophists.

“Larsen said Bitcoin’s power consumption issue could be fixed via a soft or a hard fork — both changing the network’s code to make Bitcoin less power hungry. A soft fork would preserve Bitcoin as a single blockchain. A hard fork would split Bitcoin into two separate networks, one supporting miners and the other running different code — perhaps Proof of Stake.”

Too bad Bitcoin’s energy consumption is a boon for a number of reasons: (1) the energy consumption is a strategy for securing the network, the energy cost of maintaining attacks against the network disincentivize offensive strategies; (2) the energy consumption of the Bitcoin network provides an opportunity for power producers to establish a line of revenue that is separate of societal power demands; (3) these power demands allow for bitcoin miners to act as power arbitrators, enabling them to reduce consumption in order to protect the integrity of the grid in times of need (acting as cannon fodder to take the hit so Ma & Pa can keep the lights on); (4) the energy consumption allows for oil production operations to consume the energy yield of associated natural gas rather than venting or flaring — both being negative impacts on methane emissions.

GreenPeace

GreenPeace has been trying and failing, abysmally, for years to attack bitcoin over it’s supposed negative impacts on the environment. These attempts have fallen flat on their face over the years as meme campaigns like the famous skull sculpture were reversed by the bitcoin community and truth-seekers like Daniel Batten have come out to bat for bitcoin mining.

In Conclusion

Ripple XRP is not a good faith actor in any sense of the crypto space. Not that there are many of those in the sector to start with. But Ripple and Garlinghouse are amongst the worst transgressors. Ripple XRP is not an ally to anything bitcoin or freedom related and is not in the best interests of any individual that values either, or both. They are an organization that preys upon the inexperienced and uneducated pleb that is hoping to invest in the future.

We have opportunities to invest in great projects and scrape together a little generational wealth for our loved ones, but XRP is not it. It is my position that anyone that is hoisting the flag of XRP on the social media platforms is a bad actor and their opinions over anything in the crypto space is not to be trusted, as Ripple XRP is one of the oldest projects in the space (alongside Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin) and lacking understanding of any (and all) of these stories makes them an ignorant source of information.

A Few Other Interesting Sources:

• Ripple CEO responds to accusations of lobbying against Bitcoin reserve
• Ripple Claims Bitcoin Is ‘Chinese-Controlled’ While Announcing New Lawsuit From SEC
• Greenpeace, Ripple co-founder campaigning to change Bitcoin code
• XRP is the next Bitcoin if we solve a multi-trillion-dollar problem, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse
• According to Brad Garlinghouse, mining Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) consumes a lot of energy, leaving too much carbon footprint, and this should worry climate change activists. Do you share the view of Ripple CEO
• Brad Garlinghouse vs the energy consumption of Bitcoin
• Ripple’s Garlinghouse disses Bitcoin’s energy use in advance of Biden administration
• Brad Garlinghouse Disagrees with Coinbase’s New Apolitical Stance – InsideBitcoins.com
• Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Says Bitcoin Maximalism Hurting Crypto Industry’s Lobbying Efforts: Report – The Daily Hodl

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