The only reason I didnt buy any was the coin distribution - Ripple labs and the founders had the vast majority of the XRP.  They have the ability to kill any price increase with a big sell.  This concentrated ownership position is a very big turnoff to crypto enthusiasts.

Ander,

You are ABSOLUTELY correct about the botched initial distribution.  This is Ripple's "original sin".  I agree that the founders should NOT have kept any XRP since they already hold all the company stock.  Recently there was mitigation to that aspect of it.
See https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7641 for details. 

TL;DR: All the Founders have been locked up for many years to come with no ability to sell XRP other than token weekly amounts.

One can argue about the wisdom of granting 100% of the currency to the company and this issue is clearly controversial.
If RL kept 100% of XRP then the situation with rogue founder Jed dumping billions of XRPs (this actually happened last summer ! Which made that proverbial XRP Flood Risk come to life and it was painful for everyone)

RL's position has always been that 25% of XRP would be used to fund the company indefinitely (this is the company's revenue model into the future, it has no other potential sources of revenue) and 50% would be used to seed billions of user accounts or given away in Gateway signups, etc For details see https://www.ripplelabs.com/xrp-distribution/

Still, XRP clrearly suffers from Over-concentration of holdings Risk (I used to call it Flood Risk).  The only constraint after the founders have been locked up is that it's not in RL's economic interest to torpedo the market so they will be acting as a temporary central bank of XRP ...

However, and this is what was the decisive factor for me, XRP all starts out in the single Ripple account on ledger reset, after that it tends to spread similar to how molecules would spread in a bottle if they all started in a one corner ... so Over-concentration / Flood Risk is gonna decline in the future ...

Much stronger factor are:

a. XRP can never be created but only burnt so 100 Billion was the peak.
b. There is no mining, so there's no miner sales pressuring the market as in Bitcoin.

In the end, over time, the finiteness, brownian-motion-like dispersal and absolute scarcity of the supply will overpower the downside of the initial over-concentration.

IMHO, latest rally has several fundamental reasons behind it and is NOT a pump and dump.

Reasons:

1. RL has stopped Over The Counter sales of XRP's to private parties to fund itself (source: one of Gateway operators intimated this in xrptalk.com).  This means that the last persistent seller of XRPs in the Ripple exchange itself is gone.  This also means that those private parties, such as market makers, gateways, big private whales, etc are now told to buy in the open market. RL now has both enough money in the bank to fund itself for 5+ years AND it still has a real-soon-to-be-announced deal with a consortium of VC's for Series A investment which will make it unnecessary to sell for a long long time to come.

2.  Additional XRP demand from friends-and-family of recent bankers who got or are getting on board

3. XRP valuation AS A STORE OF VALUE (not just as a speculative BTS-like DAC asset) has increased recently with increased volume ... it's a virtuous cycle ... several new exchanges began trading it

4.  BTC.SnapSwap/XRP has been the most liquid pair inside Ripple.  One of the reasons for that is that btc2ripple.com functions as both an incoming AND outgoing BTC bridge into and out of Ripple.  This means that it's possible to fund your Ripple account by simply sending BTC into an allocated BTC address and after 4 confirmations, you're ready to buy XRP inside the Ripple excchange.
Conversely, if you wish to sell XRP you simply "send yourself some BTC to some external address" and after selling XRP at best possible rates you observe a BTC transaction in 10 minutes arriving at your BTC address ... if you wish to observe XRP -> BTC cashouts in progress observe activity on this hot wallet address https://blockchain.info/address/1Q5NPoEk2ynLvCypcH5EmxSBdLs1KrYtbK

5. Trading within Ripple of ANY asset against ANY asset has no fees ... so liquidity begets liquidity.  Turns out that the most liquid exchange for KRW vs. BTC or JPY vs BTC is probably already within Ripple ... This means that Ripple functions a little like a liquidity black hole sucking liquidity from other less efficient exchanges and attracting people by both no fees and variety of assets on offer.
Notice the variety of assets and how liquid they are in the pie chart here https://www.ripplecharts.com/

6. Quote from the recent RL brochure / page: which USED to be here https://ripple.com/integrate/executive-summary-for-financial-institutions/ (presented here to show how much is "cooking" behind the scenes which outsiders don't have visibility into but friends-and-family of participants do)

Ripple Labs is working with:

Top-20 global, EU, and US banks
Consortiums of EU and US banks
Multibillion-dollar hedge funds and quantitative trading firms
Top-10 global remittance operators
Top-15 global telecoms (mobile money)


I hope this helps ...

P.S. I would rather comment on technical or economic aspects of the Ripple network instead of speculating about the recent price increase.

I am pretty sure that all banks will use ripple in the future. I still don't understand that even if that is the case why XRP will have any value...

Admitting ignorance is the beginning of wisdom (paraphrasing Socrates)

Understanding present and future value of XRP is indeed the crucial issue.

I refer you to the Sources of XRP demand section of https://ripple.com/files/ripple_deep_dive_final.pdf

For the impatient, here's the spoiler alert:

Global Liquidity Bridging Currency

( Yes Virginia, it's a very technical term well understood by a few Central Bankers and IMF Monetary Economists )

Currently the USD serves this purpose ( highly imperfectly but happens to be the least terrible of all other alternatives )

The reason why XRP is rallying is because there ARE a few people in the crypto community who DO understand FUTURE potential for XRP to play this role and given the astronomical potential upside, are willing to throw some BTC and fiat at XRP today just for the privilege of having the option to participate.

P.S. The secondary anti-spam token role can be thought of a minor transitional component of value which will be completely dwarfed in the future by the value as the Liquidity Bridging Asset/Currency

Quote from: Empirical1.1 on September 25, 2014, 02:31:09 pm

Quote from: kisa0145 on September 25, 2014, 12:38:23 pm

Wrt. diversification I have to disagree as bitAssets don't offer systematic diversification away from BTSX, while BTSX has superior risk/return characteristics...

Yes but there will probably be some profit taking that stays within BTSX. Rather than pay to convert BTSX at an exchange and then pay again to convert to fiat and then incur all the fees I listed above regards moving into silver, I'll find it much more worthwhile to go long BitSLV with some of my profit taking even though it will still have BTSX failure risk.

Not that I've actually properly shorted in practice yet, but in theory I should also be able to say short BitUSD with some of my BTSX while going long say BitSLV with another portion and keep the same overall exposure to BTSX at a time like this when I think the chance of BTSX falling a lot from this CAP is low.

Thanks Empirical appreciate your thoughts! The question I was pointing out to was that the guy who sells you bitSLV most likely BTSX bull and not rushing to cover. So when you decide to sell your bitSLV you need another willing buyer or you create downward pressure on bitSLV peg. Also an arbitrageur who might buy off you slightly below the peg will need a willing buyer closer to the peg. So I am just contemplating, if 5-10% yield will attract enough buyers at any time to ensure mkt depth and liquidity, given that there is likely to be strong interest in max shorting bitAssets. Hopefully as BM said there are enough diverse reasons apart from return for investing into bitSLV... or otherwise, at initial stage at least, shorts might need to share more of their profits with the longs...

Kisa, do you really care if the buyer of the bitSLV is another human trader or just a bot which just shorted the same amount of butSLV at parity and now is willing to cover at 99.5% of the peg ?

In other words, bytemaster's bot maybe good enough to bootstrap peg credibility in the early days ?

Quote from: alexkravets on September 12, 2014, 07:58:06 pm

IMHO, the entire wallet and all of its accounts and transactions should be recoverable from a https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0039 style 12-word seed phrase

that is already possible now .. there are just some bugs that make it a little difficult CURRENTLY!

and yes .. big marketing will only start once the wallet is stable and more usable ..

And what is the secret series of incantations (console commands) to do this ?

Agreed

0.4.9-a has the same crash just short of block 300,000

Slow sync always crashes around block 300,000.

All that is required is for devs to reproduce the crash is to simply run a virgin install on ANY Win 7 machine.

Going back to 0.4.8-a/b is NOT an option because of the hard fork.