Hi! I'm Bob

[RegalChicken 32,666]

12 minutes ago, lucky said:

 and you've been a firsthand witness.

Proof?

[BobWay 4,867]

8 hours ago, DucPeter said:

@BobWay I sometimes feel a bit like a noob, being a complete outsider, not knowing exactly who-is-who in the Ripple community or being familiar with Ripple's history in detail. I only found out about Ripple some 1.5 years ago and decided to invest for a medium / long term because I was very impressed by the whole concept and felt confident about its future. And I still do.

While I hadn't heard about you before yesterday, I have to tell you how much I appreciate your posts and detailed answers. An insider's view on the Ripple company (that is still a bit of a black box to me) and on market development gives me a better understanding of Ripple in general. Thanks, man! Hope to enjoy many more of your posts.

Ripple as a company can be pretty opaque. Especially if you are not a banker getting regular updates on our progress. I'm happy to answer questions about the people involved historically and currently. The company grows and changes quickly so I'm probably out of date already on exactly who is on which team at the moment though.

I guess I should introduce myself for those who don't know me. Don't feel bad if you don't. I purposely kept a low profile.

I discovered bitcoin reasonably early in 2010. I was pondering creating a digital currency for the web (for my own reasons) when I happened into it. I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with bitcoin. I loved the concept of a pure digital currency. I hated the monetary policy and I wasn't a big fan of the community or its "marketing plan". If you check my history (Red) from way back you'll see that I was very off and on in the bitcointalk forums.

April of 2013 was one of those "on" times again with the bitcointalk forum. Occasionally people called be back to talk about stable coins. It was during that period that I was canvasing to see of any of the alt-coin forks implemented any of the long list of suggestions we had created for bitcoin. That was when I ran across Ripple. It turned out that Ripple implemented all the improvements people had suggested for bitcoin and also a bunch of really cool stuff that I hardly understood.

So I became obsessive about Ripple. First (unpopularily) discussing it at bitcointalk. Then later at JoelKatz's suggestion discussing it on the Ripple forums. During that period a lot of really smart Canadian's (Singpolyma, dchapes, etc.) from the earlier "Classic Ripple Pay" community taught me an amazing amount about money and rippling. I obsessed so much that after 6 weeks I was the number one poster on the Ripple forum. More posts at that time than even JoelKatz! :-)

So in June I wrote Ripple asking for a job. I was the 10th hire after the founders. In my 5 years at Ripple I served in a lot of different roles all of which I'm very proud of.

• The original integration engineer
• Designed Ripple "pre-transaction messaging" system
• Designed the Ripple Rest API
• Designed RippleConnect/xCurrent
• Original product manager for RippleConnect
• Original member of Ripple research (ILP atomic mode, XRP bridge currency incentive analysis)
• Original sales engineer once we pivoted to a banking sales model
• Finally served as intellectual property wrangler between the research, engineering and legal teams

I only write al this so folks here will understand the breadth of questions I'm willing to answer. During my time at Ripple I also served is informal historian.

One of the things I've realized recently is that my greatest utility in increasing the adoption and value of XRP (and rippling in general) is in explaining to other just how well thought out the system is. I hope I can start doing that here.

[BobWay 4,867]

5 hours ago, RegalChicken said:

an hour has passed since asking, did you switch to Bitcoin? 

fair disclosure, I own a few bitcoin and either as well. But the majority of my holdings are in XRP and Ripple stock.

2 hours ago, Vader-DeWelt said:

Robert is your aunt's husband.

There's even an Arthur in there somewhere. hilarious. AND twitter post by an a-type personality.

*shudder*

I don't know what this means?

[screenshot 4]

when will we see x-rapid volume start to kick in, and how robust is ripple's test ledger?

Edited March 6, 2019 by screenshot

[Bearmark 24,268]

6 minutes ago, BobWay said:

One of the things I've realized recently is that my greatest utility in increasing the adoption and value of XRP (and rippling in general) is in explaining to other just how well thought out the system is.

That sounds book-worthy. 

[SilverSailor 55]

Hi Bob, best to you! I'm new here, but have had some XRP since Beta. I recently read someone on a crypto blog who loosely said "My Crypto coin (fill in whatever) will be/ have adoption by the big players, because no one will want to buy from a centralized company, like Ripple, but will want tokens priced on an open market" . To me this speaks of not understanding how companies work. Without giving #s, surely there are extant contracts from the small companies which have been in place since, say, the 2014 period to buy certain amounts of XRP, from Ripple Labs,  at set prices, if executed by some certain future date. Would my assumption be correct?

Edited March 6, 2019 by SilverSailor

[PG1 1,429]

I gather Anna See is now Anna Tong at PolySign?  Any insight into if/how PolySign fits into a Ripple grand vision?

And no image of Arthur Britto on Polysign team page - like a superhero without an alter ego.

[BobWay 4,867]

4 hours ago, VanGogh said:

I wonder if you could speak to the geopolitical ramifications of XRP adoption. That is, has Ripple considered this aspect beyond regulation? I know this is a touchy subject and can go in many speculative directions, but it would be interesting to hear any insight at all that you might have. 

I'm not sure I'm qualified to use fancy words like "geopolitical" correctly. :-) But there are huge improvements coming to the structure of banking.

Please keep in mind that while I think of myself as a reasonably smart guy, I'm by no means smart about everything. However, in my various positions at Ripple, a lot of much smarter people than me showed up in our office to tell me the details of their particular problems. They then left it to me to figure out if Ripple or its technologies could help. That was one of my key contributions to the company. I could almost always figure out a way to deploy Ripple technologies to solve other people's hard problems.

So "geopolitically" speaking, one of the weirdest things about banking is how the international relationships are structured. This is true especially among the smaller countries. Take a random made up example. Say Alice lives in Barbados and want to do a business transaction with Bob in Saint Lucia. It is just a standard two party business deal for services rendered. But Alice uses BBD and Bob uses XCD. So how do their banks settle that transaction?

Well it turns out in many cases they use USD. That sentence sounds pretty sensible not earth shaking to anyone... But how does that really work? Well it turns out that important banks in Barbados keep "correspondent" accounts with a large US bank. Let's say Citi in this case. And some large bank in Sant Lucia also keeps a correspondent account with a US bank. Let's say BofA in that case. The settlement actually happens by the Barbados bank telling Citi to wire money through the FedWire system to the St Lucia's account at BofA. These requests are transmitted via SWIFT.

But the crazy thing is that US law says that both Citi and BofA need to screen the transaction between Alice and Bob for compliance with US laws! And if a bad transaction slips through, both Citi and BofA can be fined huge amounts. So in effect, whether Alice in Barbados can do business with Bob in St Lucia becomes dependent on whether or not US banks want to allow it. Even though the transaction doesn't involve US jurisdiction at all!

The side effect of the US bank's risk in these transactions is that they've started closing the correspondent banking accounts for entire countries. The risk is just seen as too high for the reward (fees) that they can charge. This is called in banking jargon, "the de-risking problem".

A bridge currency like XRP changes that dynamic dramatically. Transaction that don't involve the US (or other third countries) don't have to travel through their systems to settle. That allows people to stop jumping through third party regulatory hoops and just get one with doing business.

I hope that counts as "geopolitical"!

[lucky 6,296]

18 hours ago, BobWay said:

Now enter Ripple with its built in exchange capability. Then add in the (deceptive) ease at starting a new USD gateway and Ripple's ability to end-to-end atomic payments from any currency to any currency. We managed to steal a lot of Coinbase's thunder and blurred their differentiators. Note: "deceptive" turned out to mean, easy technically, but impossible from a regulatory compliance perspective.

Are you saying here that the built in exchange capability is at a dead end? Do you expect this feature to be discontinued in a future release of the ledger software?

[Zerp_Legend 20,309]

Hi Bob ,

thank  you about giving us Info on sbi.I didn’t know that the relationship was so strong  . Any comments on Sbi Vc?

Was there a moment where you said to yourself that ripple / xrp are definitely going to be a thing ? 

 

[Zerp_Legend 20,309]

And thank you for all your answers . I think I have learned in this thread more than in 1 year 

[BobWay 4,867]

5 hours ago, Benchmark said:

how do you see the near future of PoW developing? Given the whole high energy consuming, centralized-in-mining-pools thing it has going on. 

This requires its own thread or book chapter. I don't think I can do it justice here. Let me give my nutshell opinions here and it you want a long discussion, please start a new thread and invite me to discuss it.

Historically, proof of work was a genius solution to a problem that was (at the time) thought unsolvable. (Byzantine generals)  Satoshi took that clever hack and wrapped it into a marketing scheme that was three times move clever than PoW itself. His scheme, 1) solves consensus, 2) distributes BTC in a way that can be rationalized as "fairly", 3) unleashes an army of block reward zealots to promote bitcoin for free (from Satoshi's perspective) I truly see beauty in that.

Moving forward, the PoW system is silly and wasteful for most use cases, save one. Crime. It turns out that if you want to launch a "fire and forget" scam, then walk away into anonymity, then PoW works great. It turns your hardest problem, operations, into someone else's problem.

Here I absolutely AM NOT implying that bitcoin itself is a scam. It is not. But neither is bitcoin's continuing use of PoW necessary. The Ripple ledger proved that. The only time PoW is necessary is if you MUST reach consensus among completely anonymous parties. If you know who wants to reach consensus and why, the problem gets much easier.

[Gilligan 4,351]

2 hours ago, BobWay said:

One of the things I've been trying to judge is if I should write a book or perhaps start a blog about Ripple, blockchain technology, crypto, money, the future of banking, etc.

Does anyone feel something like that would be useful?

 

Hi Bob and welcome!  

In answer to your question, YES PLEASE!   As you can probably tell from the questions you have received so far, most people here would appreciate the opportunity to hear more about your experience of being involved with the growth of Ripple on a personal level, as well as technical information you could provide from your unique perspective as an engineer.  You have already given us invaluable insight and I for one appreciate your efforts very much and look forward to your future endeavours.  Thank you!

Edited March 6, 2019 by Gilligan
word choice

[Guest]

Did people at Ripple after a discussion with various options (of which one was yours),  ever say:    “Ah feck it...  let’s do it the Bob Way!”     

Or are there no Dads there to make crappy Dad jokes....     

[BobWay 4,867]

40 minutes ago, PG1 said:

I gather Anna See is now Anna Tong at PolySign?  Any insight into if/how PolySign fits into a Ripple grand vision?

And no image of Arthur Britto on Polysign team page - like a superhero without an alter ego.

Anna See and Anna Tong (TongA) are two different people. Anna See has worked with Chris since his early ventures. She was responsible for founding the Ripple office and making sure everyone who worked there was happy and got paid. She is literally the rock the company is built on.

Anna Tong was an early product manager at Ripple who worked for Asheesh Birla. I noted the same thing as you on the site. She is now working with Arthur's new venture.

In the existing financial world there are some important parties that serve as "asset custodians". Their role is to help other business transaction go smoothly. For example the DTCC serves as a custodian and helps clear stock transactions. Arthur and his team realized that there isn't good hardware support to help these custodians manage and support cryptocurrency (especially XRP) transactions. Basically, every time you hear "X exchange got hacked and lost Y crypto" you should think, "they should be using Arthur and David's new system".

Arthur doesn't like his picture taken. He's just too attractive and hates the extra attention.