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This is an eye opening read for any coin holder let alone if you hold Bitcoin. Dated 01 November 2017 https://theflippening.github.io/open-letter-to-bitcoin-miners-from-another-miner/ Extract: The action plan to consolidate the market cap back into one Bitcoin Clearly the most obvious plan is to switch all our mining effort over to mining Bitcoin Cash, the only true Bitcoin as designed by Satoshi. However we must go about this in a coordinated fashion among all the mining pools for maximum effect: Firstly we must get our mining equipment ready to switch to the Bitcoin Cash chain at a moment's notice or the push of a button. Secondly we need to switch to Bitcoin Cash mining before the SegWit2X hard fork in order to have a chance at killing this unnecessary fork off before it begins. The plan is to put all our mining power on the Legacy Bitcoin until the next regular (2016 block) difficulty adjustment at block 493,920[ref] which will occur on about November 10 / 11. This ensures that the difficulty adjustment will increase and be as punitive as possible. This will make it practically impossible for any remnant miners to try keep the chain alive. Ignore any emergency difficulty adjustments occurring on the Bitcoin Cash chain during this time and keep mining Legacy Bitcoin for this two week period. Some of us with auto-profit switching turned on will need to turn this off. There should be a minimum amount of mining effort going towards the Bitcoin Cash chain at this time just to keep it moving steadily. The majority of the mining effort should stay on the Legacy Bitcoin chain to push the difficulty up as much as possible so it cannot survive with reduced hashpower in the future. Thirdly, before this upward difficulty adjustment has kicked in, send all your Legacy Bitcoin and recent mining profits to an exchange. This may take 3 or so confirmations to get there so put a reasonable fee on it. Mining pools still mining Legacy Bitcoin can include their own transactions before anyone else's to make sure they get onto an exchange. Setup immediate sell orders to dump your coins on the exchange and buy up all Bitcoin Cash that you can. This will put downwards pressure on the price of Legacy Bitcoin and upwards pressure on the price of Bitcoin Cash. Users and large holders of Legacy Bitcoin (whales) can also help out here by selling off their Legacy Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash over the next few weeks. Finally, the most important part is when the upwards difficulty adjustment has occurred on Legacy Bitcoin this is the time to switch all our mining efforts to Bitcoin Cash. This means all mining pools or as many as possible. If you can't switch it quickly, turn the miner off until you can. We want the Legacy Bitcoin chain to slow down and freeze up completely. It will have 2016 blocks to go at maximum difficulty and minimal hash power. Also keep the miners pointed at the Bitcoin Cash chain regardless of any temporary price and profitability fluctuations. Eventually over a week or two the price of Bitcoin will collapse once the realisation and panic sets in because no more transactions will be getting confirmed and the chain will be effectively crawling or frozen. Once Bitcoin Cash has the majority hash power it is only a matter of weeks until it reaches the highest cumulative proof of work[ref]. Once this happens Bitcoin Cash will rightfully be able to take the Bitcoin name and BTC ticker moving forward if desired. The corporate takeover of Bitcoin will be averted. Effects and consequences Let's examine some of the effects for this plan of action: Users that held Legacy Bitcoin at the moment of the Bitcoin Cash fork on August 1st 2017 will have the same amount of Bitcoin Cash and will lose nothing. This will be the majority of people. A fair amount of money is still locked up in exchanges like Coinbase. Speculators and investors (or really we should call them gamblers), who have been buying into the Legacy Bitcoin over the past 2 months will lose their money if they do not sell their holdings over the next week or so. In reality they deserve to lose their money as they were buying into a worthless coin without doing their research. A store of value without any actual utility, or significantly degraded utility, is worthless. Legacy Bitcoin is terrible investment which shows they did not do their research at all. They were just buying into the hype and inflated price. A fool and their money are soon parted. People who sold their Bitcoin Cash after the fork instead of sensibly holding both coins and waiting for the eventual outcome will also be left with nothing. This will teach them for not doing their research properly and believing BlockStream/Core propaganda. The toxic BlockStream/Core developers, fanatics and their propaganda army which has been censoring discussion, trolling discussion forums, Reddit and Twitter will also be left holding bags of worthless SegWit coins. This will be a well deserved punishment for them. Censorship of forums and subreddits has played a big part in brainwashing many people. BlockStream and Core will have some serious explaining to do. Any remaining miners not on board with this plan and still mining Legacy Bitcoin will be left mining a slow, high difficulty chain, perhaps at best 1 block every few hours or 1 block per day. Their profitability will sink and they will eventually need to switch to Bitcoin Cash to maintain profitability. BlockStream/Core may even come up with a drastic plan to introduce a hard fork to change the Proof of Work algorithm and add a new dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm of their own. However by then it will be too late, the largest cumulative Proof of Work will be with Bitcoin Cash. Legacy Bitcoin will no longer be able to carry the Bitcoin name. BlockStream/Core may even try to throw their weight behind the Bitcoin Gold fork which uses GPU mining but with evidence of a 100,000 coin pre-mine and no software released so far it is essentially a scam coin[ref]. End of Extract

This is a question many new investors must ask as they wade into the heavy topics around crypto-currency. I analyze the differences that impact personal financial risk between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. As hedge funds and other institutional investors enter crypto, it's a question that larger organizations will be asking as well. Hope you enjoy the read, and please leave any feedback below. Feel free to share my blog with anybody else or on any other medium & thank you for doing so! My blog announcements on other media: Twitter Reddit r/Ripple Reddit r/xrp Reddit r/CryptoCurrency Reddit r/CryptoMarkets Bitcointalk - alt coin sub forum Bitcointalk - XRP speculation thread

The forks for Bitcoin are once again causing market uncertainty and unstable prices; I break down the fork news and talk about the differences between how Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP code is governed. Can you guess which of those three has the type of enterprise-level code governance that banks and FIs will want? Hope you enjoy the read & feel free to leave any feedback below. As usual, please feel free to share my blog on any other media, and thank you for doing so! My blog announcements on other media: Twitter Reddit Bitcointalk - alt coin sub forum Bitcointalk - XRP speculation thread

The XRP token is not in the current bull run because of some misconceived reasons which require scrutiny: 1) Although many banks are using the XRP platform as a money transfer system, the XRP token is not boosted by this fact because the ledger has nothing to do with the altcoin. My idiot-level view: Imaging the XRP platform to be a car that can run on different types/brands of fuel like gasoline, water, diesel, brine, etc. (i.e. the metaphors for major fiat currencies, Bitcoin and the major Altcoins including the XRP token, collectively the "Usable Currencies"). In such a sense it can be said the XRP ledger (the "car") is currently helping banks remit many forms of money (the Usable Currencies) at a high speed and low remittance fees . However, such remittance fees, though much lower than SWIFT fees, do vary from Usable Currency to Usable Currency with that of the XRP token being the lowest. Quite obviously, as the XRP token is currently not in circulation to the extent of fiats and Bitcoin, it means it is these Usable Currencies minus the XRP token that are the current "fuel" driving the XRP platform. And the XRP firm has to let this be the situation for now in order for the platform to gain usage and popularity and as such the XRP token has not as yet experienced any great demand as the would-be ultimate currency for remittances. Once the platform catches on and becomes a popular way of remitting money, users will start comparing remittance costs among Usable Currencies and that is when the XRP Altcoin will hit the moon. Simply put, the token is indeed linked to the ledger but when you introduce a new car in the market with your own brand of petrol, you have to allow the car to sell well first before the petrol that goes with it can gain traction. 2) The XRP platform aims to replace the SWIFT system of money transfer, but since SWIFT is owned by banks, one can be sure the banks will not allow it to happen. My idiot-level view: The above is based on the wrong presumption that SWIFT is owned by all banks in the world and each bank stands to lose out should XRP take over SWIFT. The truth is SWIFT is only owned by its members which are financial institutions and non-member financial institutions do not benefit from the high fees charged by the SWIFT system. In any event, financial institutions are not the only party transferring money, non-banking related businesses, which is the overwhelming majority, also have to remit/transfer money and it is due to a lack of choice that they have to make use of the SWIFT system via banks. The XRP system enables such majority to bypass banks and SWIFT. The fact that so many banks have presently converted themselves to XRP banks (see below) proves that it is a matter of time before SWIFT banks become overwhelmed because XRP fees are as much as 60% cheaper. 3) New ledgers/platforms are coming into existence which adopt or copy some of XRP"s technology and as such, the XRP token is unlikely to appreciate and instead its price may even collapse. My idiot-level view: Presently, XRP has been approved or is being used by the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, a consortium of Japanese banks with 61 members including Japan Post Bank as well as the country’s three megabanks – Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group – representing more than 80 per cent of Japanese banking assets, the Siam Commercial Bank, with another between 20 and 25 banks planning to sign with Ripple in the next 18 months in the Asia-Pacific region. There is also a lot of interest expressed by both the public and the private banks in China with one of the biggest banks there already using the system which is also supported by large communities, including those of Google, Facebook and Uber. And the Ripple team is working hard in signing up more users worldwide. Such first mover advantage will be very difficult for any new competitor to overtake. 4) XRP's Interledger solution is a peer-to-peer solution which means banks using it can lose control of their own network as distinct from a Hyperledger, which is a private blockchain with a centralised hub to control the process and banks using it will be able to control transactions among their own branches. My idiot-level view: As previously mentioned, banks presently do a lot of remittances/transfers because businesses, which form the bulk of remitters, have no choice but to do so through banks. Once the XRP system catches on because of its great savings and its flexibility and convenience of use (without for anyone having to go to or through the bank) monetary transfers by banks will fall to a negligible level. As such, the role of banks in such transfers is likely to be wiped out someday. Hence, the point here is a non-issue to me. 5) The Ripple firm has retained 60 billion XRP coins and can therefore flood the market with it causing the token's unit price to collapse. My idiot-level view: Apart from the firm's promise in locking 14 billion in XRP Cryptocurrency (which does not seem to appease many people so far), the truth of the matter is this. Would the firm shoot itself in the foot by allowing the XRP unit price to collapse thereby rendering whatever XRP coins it is holding or retaining worthless? 6) XRP is a centralized system which means the system is under the control of a single firm. My idiot-level view: The question here is this. Does XRP the firm introduce its technology to the world just for the sake of technology or the fun of it, or is it also to make money? If it is also to make money, the fact that the system is under centralized control must mean that it gives the firm a guaranteed freedom without interference to administer the whole platform and improve on it wherever necessary in order to steer it to become the world's standard for money transfers or, to put it in another way, to ensure that whatever XRP coins it is retaining will make a lot of money for all those guys who have been contributing towards the technology and managing the whole system. In short, why begrudge these guys making big money out of their tokens? Do third-party holders of XRP coins be it investors, punters, businesses, banks, etc. not stand to benefit in the process if the closed system becomes a success unlike what is now happening to decentralized Bitcoin -- think BTC, BTH, SegWit2x, and other potential forks that have yet to come about! Is that good for Bitcoin as the top Cryptocurrency? 7) XRP is dead because of the above (misconceived) allegations. My idiot-level view: Apart from the above views in rebuttal, the point here is that currently at about 16 cents, XRP is almost guaranteed to be the best punt for one to at least double his capital quickly once BTC's price starts to unwind together with those of ETH, BTH, etc. in tandem when those who have sold out to take profit will likely put part of it into XRP hopefully to double or triple their profits because at 16 cents it is not that difficult for XRP to go up by just another 16 or more to 32 and above. THE ABOVE IS NOT INTENDED AS FINANCIAL ADVICE BUT JUST A PERSONAL VIEW