It’s been one of biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap for a long time and many of us are familiar with Ripple and it’s cryptocurrency XRP. However, what use does it have for the individual investor? Is anyone actually buying anything with Ripple? Are there any businesses out there that accept XRP as a means of payment?
The Ripple network is basically a cryptographic layer over the traditional banking system. It facilitates faster and cheaper interbank payments and remittances. XRP provides the liquidity for these transactions.
Ripple frequently announce that they have signed agreements with major financial corporations which boosts sentiment and drives more investment in XRP. However, some of these large financial institutions will use the Ripple system to transfer fiat currencies and commodities without having a requirement to use XRP. Ripple looks like a great company with excellent technology but what can XRP really be worth if there is no requirement for their corporate clients to use it?
I think that many small investors are buying XRP as a speculative trade because they hear Ripple partnering with major financial institutions and therefore believe that the currency will rocket in value at some point in the future. That may well be true but I am becoming a bit sceptical.
Another important point to mention is that 100 Billion XRP were created but only 38 Billion have been released so far. Releasing billions more XRP in the future will no doubt have an impact on it's price. Just recently Ripple placed 55 Billion XRP into escrow to ensure certainty of total supply.
The price of XRP is less volatile than many other cryptos but after a recent climb to $0.25, it has started to drop back. Is it time to move out of Ripple and into some higher growth alt-coins?
There hasn’t been much coverage of Potcoin (POT) on the YouTube channels or the marijuana themed cryptos in general. I think commentators are missing out on some big news here and I would like to prompt a discussion on the developments in the marijuana industry and the various cryptocurrencies that have been developed to utilise a functioning and legalised hemp based economy.
Firstly, both Canada and numerous US states are starting to legalize recreational marijuana use in addition to medicinal use. The state of California and it’s huge economy is looking to legalise recreational use in 2018. This will mean massive business growth and many new jobs will be created as new customers flock to the dispensaries.
Marijuana based businesses based in the United States require banking facilities which are often difficult to obtain because federal law still considers cannabis an illegal drug. The use of Potcoin as a currency for trading is an obvious solution to this problem.
There have been many cannabis themed cryptocurrencies that have come into existence over the last few years. HempCoin (THC), DopeCoin (DOPE) and CannabisCoin (CANN) have all failed to establish themselves beyond small scale use.
Potcoin by comparison has by far the biggest market cap, trading volume and community of users. What is great about investing in Potcoin is that the consensus algorithm is proof-of-stake (POSV) meaning that you can gain interest of up to 5% a year by staking your wallet balance on the network. Payments on the Potcoin network are much faster compared to Bitcoin and the network fees are extremely low (0.01 POT). The current value of each Potcoin is $0.41.
The Potcoin blockchain is still only 3GB and the QT wallet is not very demanding on computer resources. As Potcoin does not use a proof-of-work (POW) consensus, the network therefore does not require much energy and so it is environmentally friendly.
If you look at Potcoin’s continued growth and the massive potential growth of the legalised marijuana industry, then investing in Potcoin would appear to be a win win decision.
When Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was created as a result of the hard fork on August 1 2017, many investors did not expect this new cryptocurrency to compete with Bitcoin (BTC). Despite an initial price rally in August, the value of BCash declined during September and October, eventually being worth just 0.052 BTC by October 21.
After the Bitcoin hard fork (SegWit2x) was called off on November 8, the price of BCash started to rally. There were many claims on social media that BCash was the new Bitcoin, that this was the start of the “flippening” and that many loyal Bitcoin holders were heading for the exit because Bitcoin would now not scale due to it’s high fees and slow transaction times.
Was there really a mass exodus out of Bitcoin for these reasons? Certainly the price of Bitcoin declined by approximately 20% over the next few days. However, the massive surge in the BCash trading volume and price could not be explained solely by investors moving out of Bitcoin. There was clearly new money piling into BCash, mostly through the South Korean exchanges.
I would argue that there were also some underhand tactics by the BCash team in order to attack the Bitcoin network. On November 9 the Bitcoin mempool started to increase in size dramatically, eventually reaching 160,000 unconfirmed transactions (the mempool stores Bitcoin transactions that are waiting to be confirmed). Was this huge increase in unconfirmed transactions due to investors desperately trying to get out of Bitcoin or had the network been a victim of an attack involving many tens of thousands of small spam transactions? Once the mempool was congested, BCash and it’s supporters were able to make substantiated claims that Bitcoin was now dysfunctional, useless and a sinking ship.
I realise that the BCash team are doing their utmost to promote their digital currency, but do they really need to obtain validity by launching network attacks on Bitcoin and then pointing to the damage caused in order to claim that Bitcoin is finished and is no longer a functioning system.
At present BCash does have much lower fees and faster payments due to it’s 8mb block size. However, many people have overlooked the fact that the Bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP148) user activated soft fork (UASF) took place on the Bitcoin network back in August and as a result the block size has increased slightly beyond the previous 1mb limit.
The weekend of November 11/12, 2017 was certainly an historical and pivotal moment in the Bitcoin story thus far. My guess is that there will be more battles between the current and future Bitcoin hard forks as we journey on through the ever expanding crypto universe.
