1st post to ask a nagging question about XRP and Ripple

[Bagheera 657]

I have been following Ripple and XRP for a month now and have tucked away some XRP for a rainy day. I have also been reading statements on the internet indicating that Ripple customers do not need to use XRP and can use their own or any other. Can someone point me to the value proposition for XRP if this is in fact true? Thank you, much appreciated.

[JoelKatz 8,240]

That's true. We spent the first few years trying to get financial institutions to transact on a public ledger. They had quite a few objections. But the main issue was simply that there wasn't enough payment volume to justify all the effort it would take them to solve all the compliance, governance, and integration problems. So we listened to our customers and came up with a way for them to justify the integration effort needed without forcing them to transact on a public ledger. I summarized it in this post: 

The supposed downside to this approach is that XRP will have to compete on a level playing field. But you can get people to cooperate to build a level playing field and it's good for the entire space as other cryptos can compete as well. We believe XRP can win in a fair fight. The analogy I use is if you were Twitter but there was no Internet. You wouldn't try to build an Internet biased in Twitter's favor. You wouldn't try to force people to use Twitter to use the Internet. You'd cooperate with everyone else to build the best Internet possible, and then you'd make Twitter the best service you could. Everyone wins.

Of course, that's Ripple's (the company's) strategy. Others are free to use XRP for any applications they want. Recently, people have discovered that they can use XRP for pretty much any application they'd use bitcoin for. And they benefit from XRP's faster transactions, higher throughput, lower transaction fee, better governance, and significant feature set including key rotation, escrow, native multisign, distributed exchange, cross-currency payments, and so on.

[Hodor 21,708]

10 minutes ago, JoelKatz said:

Recently, people have discovered that they can use XRP for pretty much any application they'd use bitcoin for. And they benefit from XRP's faster transactions, higher throughput, lower transaction fee, better governance, and significant feature set including key rotation, escrow, native multisign, distributed exchange, cross-currency payments, and so on.

Beautiful summation

26 minutes ago, Bagheera said:

Can someone point me to the value proposition for XRP if this is in fact true? Thank you, much appreciated.

JK said it the most concisely.  If you want Ripple's official value proposition about how it benefits banks and ForEx exchanges, then their material is also helpful for a deeper dive:

https://ripple.com/files/xrp_cost_model_paper.pdf

[Bagheera 657]

Thank you JoelKatz and Hodor, this is very much appreciated. My own summary then would be as long as Ripple remains focused on delighting its customers and those who hold XRP exercise patience for the long term strategic plan that Ripple has in mind, then it will be a win-win for Ripple and XRP holders.