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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The world is headed toward Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and everybody knows it, even the people who don’t want them (which at the moment looks to be most people).

But the policy-makers have deigned it be so, and CBDCs provide such a compelling opportunity for surveillance and social control that they are irresistible. That the fiat currency system is in the process of imploding makes it an imperative.

My editor and researcher JonB, (give him a follow) sent me this tweet:

Australia to be ‘functionally cashless’ by 2025. Australian people have to stop this madness and start using more cash, otherwise we will be ruled by the banks and government and rationing will affect everyone. https://t.co/ygfpzMYNcf

— Giggity (@GiggityVJ) September 24, 2023

It was to draw my attention to the timeline for Australia going cashless, and while doing so doesn’t coincide with the launch of their CBDC, the RBA is dilligently headed there (as are nearly all central banks globally).

One area of focus in The Bitcoin Capitalist is that we track all the national CBDC deployments and the myriad supranational policies and aspirations that go into them (we call it “Eye on EvilCoin”, for the Mr. Robot fans out there).

With the tweet above, I became more intrigued by the call-to-action itself, because I see this a lot: the idea that the way to resist the CBDC is to keep using cash. This is not only wrong-headed, it’s self-defeating.

The idea that the way to resist the CBDC is to keep using cash is not only wrong-headed, it’s self-defeating.
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Cash doesn’t buy you freedom under CBDCs

The error in thinking so arises from a failure to understand that cash is simply older iteration of what digital cash, and CBDCs are going to be: denominations in a currency, backed by nothing and controlled by the very state that you’re trying to protect yourself from.

It gets worse, because this is also the same state that has already weaponized the currency against you, either slowly, via targeted inflation (a.k.a “theft”) or overtly, as we saw here in Canada during the #FreedomConvoy.

The only thing I can see happening to the paper cash economy after a given country has (successfully) gone cashless, is that the paper currency will lose most of its value and everything gets far more expensive when priced in terms of cash.

It’ll be easier to destroy cash than ban it

Far easier. After all, governments and central banks have been destroying cash throughout history.

In all probability, they won’t even have to ban cash or impose penalties for using it.

All they’ll have to do is crank up the money printer and hyperinflate it out of existence – all the while offering holders of cash the opportunity to switch into the CBDC at seemingly advantageous (or one-sided) terms.

At that point, banning cash will seem akin to banning the buggy whip. Kind of pointless.

The Good News

While it’s practically baked-in that CBDCs will either launch as, or morph into, CCP-style social credit systems, what is unknown at the moment is if Late Stage Globalism’s financial system will actually hold together long enough for retail CBDCs to deploy.

We see a lot of tweets and Youtube videos from people predicting a snap launch of a CBDC after a sudden banking holiday in the imminent future.

I don’t see that as possible, because there isn’t a major economy in the world that is anywhere close to being ready to launch a retail CBDC.

There are numerous interbank clearing networks that are either in test beds or already up and running. FedNow’s launch over the summer is one, and many say that is a precursor to the CBDC launch.

But at the retail level: on your phone, monitoring every transaction, metering your carbon footprint – this is still a long way off.

The US, the IMF, the BIS et al are still writing white papers about it. Many of them are chilling, to be sure, but they’re still navel gazing and not actually working on it. The UK just announced their retail CBDC roadmap and the research phase alone will start this year and go on for the next three years.

In Canada there are some tests going on but even the Bank of Canada admits there isn’t a compelling use case for CBDCs and not many Canadians really want it.

Of the four retail CBDCs already  up and running (The Bahamas, Jamaica, The Eastern Caribbean Dollar, and Nigeria), they have all been plagued with technical problems or public apathy. Venezuela has launched two CBDCs over the past decade, each launch coinciding with a massive currency devaluation, and they both stiffed.

But it’s Nigeria’s eNaira which is the closest to a heavy-handed government forced CBDC. Although there is no social credit component yet -authorities there were pressing hard for a full-on cash ban to get people to use it, and that’s gone quite badly. Nigerians are opting for gold and Bitcoin instead (hold that thought).

The global financial system is coming unglued so fast that governments may find themselves forced to accelerate retail CBDC projects.

My prediction has always been that in a crisis they’ll resort to some half-baked abomination that rolls out atop a base layer that already exists: like Ethereum (which we’re already seeing in Brazil) or Ripple – who seems to want to be the base layer for CBDCs.

Once CBDC’s hit, we will wind up in a type of Monetary Apartheid, and the important thing to understand is that clinging to cash isn’t going to save you.

Fortunately, no matter which path toward retail CBDCs governments choose, it will take long enough  that you still have time to prepare.

Fortunately, no matter which path toward retail CBDCs governments choose, it will take long enough that you still have time to prepare.
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Precious metals are a favourite amongst the liberty-minded. Wisdom and history show it prudent to have some of your wealth in gold and silver (the FDR gold ban is actually instructive there because even though many people refer to it, it wasn’t overly successful in terms of public compliance).

But real sovereignty will lie in having access to a digital hard-asset that is truly decentralized and that can be frictionlessly moved around the globe, impervious to capital controls.

I am talking of course, about Bitcoin. Start a dollar cost average today, get off zero – and you will be in an entirely different economic class from 95% of the people who get blindsided when retail CBDCs do roll out.

It’s also entirely possible that Late Stage Globalism may implode before then and make it all moot. But even then, you’re still going to need some way of preserving and safeguarding your wealth, and paper cash will be especially useless in that event. You’ll also need the ability to move it, at will, and that isn’t always easy to do with gold.

The ideal toolkit contains both Bitcoin and precious metals, among other elements which are out of scope here (second passports, property and businesses in multiple jurisdictions, etc).

The main point is this: If your goal is to mitigate against a cashless society, one of the least effective ways of doing it would be with cash.

My forthcoming ebook The CBDC Survival Guide will give you the tools and the knowledge to navigate coming era of Monetary Apartheid. Bombthrower subscribers will get free when it drops, sign up today.

The Bitcoin Capitalist provides actionable intelligence on the macro forces shaping Late Stage Globalism and a tactical toolkit for growing your wealth as it plays out. Try it today here.

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