Ripple Usecase - Please confirm

[sitepodmatt]

First off, I'm not interested in trading XRP, pumping, dumping, or to moon ****. I think current state of affairs is quite silly, I am however interested in the utility of Ripple outside of walled enterprise where we have no visibility.

Beyond the technical docs most of information I read is very abstract, or curtailed 'well for banks really or enterprise', however I've tried to figure the utility out.

Let's start with what I think and if this would be suitable use-case.

Me, Fred, John, Bill, and Mary want to exchange farm produce in our little village.  Fred proposed he would run the book but everyone else was concerned about the concentration of power and for Fred to be able to manipulate things given his exposure to everything and potential for limited price discovery for everyone else, so instead of purchasing a VillageExchangeServer (which Fred could configure to his liking) + 5 client licenses we instead looked to Ripple.

At our village meeting, each participant purchase a nominal amount of XRP from an say Bitfinex and withdrew to their private phone wallet to conduct transactions. Each participant then loaded their assets onto Ripple via a transaction e.g. 100kg/Corn/$1-per-kg and so on. People could purchase other people's assets via submitting a buy transaction with amount and dollar.  Everyone was happy, burning a few US$ pennies worth of XRP to have a exchange where no single person ran it.

Is this practical? Would our exchange somehow be partition/isolated from the rest of Ripple?  And of course clearing of such would be outside the remit of Ripple?

If this isn't practical, please tell me what is today, right now, without going behind closed doors banks/enterprise - otherwise I'm totally perplexed about why XRP is worth so much.

 

Confused.

 

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tl;dr - rethought this. What can I joe-public non-bank non-enterprise affiliate do with XRP today other than trade it on an exchange or use it as a store of value?

Secondly, if it just banks and enterprises, surely they won't be using public XRP to pay for their transactions costs? they will have their own private implementation of ripple network and own way of sharing transaction costs?  Is XRP just a side project on ripple's public network?

 

Edited December 15, 2017 by sitepodmatt