GrayFox

The reason they are getting into games because of stuff like this: https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/29/5356498/eve-online-battle-sees-200000-dollars-worth-of-spaceships-destroyed There's dormant cash lying around in these ********!

In all fairness they wanted their gold back from the Bank of England but the bank just keep avoiding their call or pretending they called the wrong number

Basically Ripple's lawyers and the court told the plaintiffs:

This^ also to add, the Bank of England's new RTGS system is looking to do the same. A plug 'n' play approach where central bank money will no longer be exclusive to just banks. So liquidity providers could potential tap into the central bank. This brings back the meeting that the central bank governors got together to decide the future of fintechs. It has been brewing for a while now https://www.ccn.com/japan-quietly-hosted-a-blockchain-roundtable-for-central-banks-regulators

Good point! And that's what I'm counting on. I'll elaborate in incoherent and slightly drunk fashion: Incumbent banks are at a precipice and must change or evolve or both in order to survive. I am not in one of those "short the banks" camps but as technology evolves, their role becomes more and more insignificant. Case in point, in the 70s the Irish bankers taking note of the 1968 sanitation workers strike in New York believed they could bring the country to a halt because apparently they played a huge role. During the time of the strike, the economy was fine, in fact around $5 billion exchanged hands and some sectors even saw growth. Local pubs took the role of banks providing liquidity (no pun intended). The strike lasted around 6 months until the bankers got bored and went back to work. Banks refuse to bank the unbanked because it's not profitable. Banks refuse to modernise their systems because good enough apparently is good enough and yet every now and then this leads to catastrophic IT malfunctions like the recent TSB one in the UK. Banks are doing exactly what they accuse cryptos of doing - Money laundering and tax evasion - UBS bank springs to mind just recently. The UK RTGS system for example was only open exclusively to banks and now it's being modernised and will open its doors to everyone that applies. This further reduces the role of banks and the clock is ticking as they have by 2025 before the system is fully live. There's so much emphasis on banks being the key to the whole industry and yet I don't think they play a huge role. They do have a role to play but not as much in my opinion. Ripple, I believe is aiming to play a role in one of the most significant sectors that contribute to a chunk of emerging markets GDPs and that's the Small Medium Enterprise. About 500m jobs need to be created in the next 10-15 years to soak up the workforce and a huge chunk of the employment actually comes from SMEs. Due to lack of liquidity and awful financial infrastructure, their growth is stunted. Imagine becoming the fastest and quickest liquidity provider to these SMEs. XRP could potentially increase growth in the SME sector and vice versa. A fire that feeds itself. Back to my rum......

If they had the marauder suits in the first film, that movie could have ended in the first 30 mins

Most fun war movie ever made!

Cheers for the awesome read! PS: The end needed this pic included

Not really, HSBC owns a minority stake in the bank (around 40%). It was one of the earliest banks to open shop their but some of the Gulf countries are akin to China where they don't like foreign ownership of certain sectors and the state tends to own the controlling stakes. As of now, Saudi Arabia owns 60% stake in the bank so its not entirely true to say HSBC owns it but they do play an incredible role in many of the Bank's ventures and have partnered on many projects. If anything SABB might be the xRapid gateway drug for HSBC

Good points you've raised. Their banking license as well I think currently is with St Lucia, which is a tiny island nation so I'm guessing this is a shell bank for anybody interested in tax evasions

Yeah, believe his name is Leckow. He was also present at last year's Swell event. He crops up around Ripple a lot!

5 years is not really a long time. It took Amazon over 21 years to get from $1.50 in 1997 to the current $1,570. I know adoption rates these days are much faster but even a 5 year time scale is too much to ask considering blockchain and dlt is ushering a new age. I say this because Amazon launched at a time when the Internet was young and nobody knew what to make of it and it grew as we went along as the internet matured. Ripple is in the same situation currently as its trying to market a product based on a technology that really took the spotlight just last bull run so even if the adoption would be twice as fast as Amazon then 10 years is my best estimate. I'll probably get ridiculed to hell and back but it doesn't really matter, if I'm right we win and I'm wrong, we still win. Clinton ushered regulations for the internet in the early 90s and Amazon launched in 1994 and the rest was history. We barely have any regulations for cryptos.

When you say you've been in XRP for a long time, define long time?

The purchase was a steal for Visa to be honest. Earthport had a tough 2018 and CEO was replaced back this summer who also brought changes including ex-Visa employee into the board. Visa saw a wounded animal, seized the moment and sunk their teeth in. I don't believe Visa wants anything to do with Ripple as the former sees the latter as a competitor. Correspondent banking has seen a decline for a while now from incumbents and Visa is positioning itself to take on the empty seats left by the big banks. Its odd that the demand for correspondent banking is on the rise but the old guards are walking away. Is it the stringent regulations and capital requirements forcing banks to pull back and refocus? Banks surely can't be fighting wars home and abroad. They are taking a beating from Digital banks at home and now digitisation is about to take their grounds in the cross border battlefield If it wasn't Earthport then Visa surely would have looked elsewhere as they need the infrastructure and it was a lucrative deal to acquire a company that had a tough year so shares were on the cheap.

Isn't Payoneer a customer of Earthport? Surely they had a taste of Ripple https://www.earthport.com/why-earthport/clients/