Alright I'm going to respond just to you on this - because it's a fun exercise Let's start with the "OG" Cypherpunk view. The Sovereign Individual. That you can push the orange button and unplug from the matrix. I'm in the weeds of that reality, in PR. And I see that's not true Very practically - a 'state' as it were is constructed by *laws* and a *judicial system*. And even if you live in a favella of a failed state it's not really a useful evolution. More a flight. Which is more like Gold and therefore not that interesting. Hobbesian brutalism with an internet overlay feels like an evolutionary dead end This anti state frame has been obsolete since COVID - basically. When Blackrock first developed its Bitcoin fetish and wanted to do the first ETF. And we collectively memed ourselves, via LINK, ETH etc that the "institutions were coming". What ETH and LINK did not fully or adequately anticipate was the *extent* to which the institutions would include the government itself. Ala Trump family members. And Senators who were getting paid in crypto to advance legislation. This was a problem w the original E-Cash thesis. It never got big enough where you could pay for its viability On top of that BTC is sitting there just absolutely lighting money on fire securing the network. SOL is doing the same thing (fast transactions in a decentralized way are extremely expensive). And ETH can't deliver fast transactions on the L1 which requires aggressively subsidized L2s So XRP exists in an interesting state where it's a 1] Token that acknowledges that crypto has started wrapping around the state itself and ontologically accepts that as "the correct way of things" 2] Heavily hated because people do not want to admit this is the case. In their hearts, people who hate the system don't want to 3] replacement to obsolete financial rails. We know - basically that the USD is shitty collateral. Because the US froze russian bank accounts. So say what you will about the lacking viability of replacing swift. But the idea of replacing swift with a blockchain is no longer crazy 4] rejection of smart contracts - which, is the more controversial view. Do not truly have PMF. They're a series of failures and non adopted apps paid for by retail liquidity. XRP holders ironically do not lose their money holding XRP because there are not any expensive apps on the chain to lose their money on. Pump Fun made $700m in SOL and sold the entire amount just in the past year. While SOL itself is making $500k a day and needs $16m to break even. So basically - SOL is getting spit roasted by 1. Mercenary apps who don't hold the base asset 2. Victimized users who are losing their SOL And ETH smart contracts are mostly a toy at best. Defi TVL is mostly betting on stupid stuff or ponzis. And it might become a thing in the future if we move assets on chain but it's looking increasingly likely the assets won't be on ETH. They'll be on private blockchains then traded in random venues. Or Hyperliquid will have traded nasdaq futures and we'll exist in perp world or whatever 5. So XRP becomes a. A fixed supply currency (good) b. which works within the system (fine) c. with fast finality (essential) d. that doesn't pay validators And then if you're like 'XRP is centralized' - it's functionally not important bc Ripple Labs cannot functionally censor the chain without tanking its value. Ironically Ripple can't even use its own system to send FX transfers bc they can't freeze the 1 XRP address on the OFAC sanction list e. that has proven its international liquidity in the US, Japan and Korea f. That has a long running up time and proven exchange integration So if you are in a position of maximal cynicism - ie that the government itself is "in on it" - i.e. a debt Jubilee. XRP is an extremely based asset. It's basically saying "yea cryptocurrency is basically a conspiracy theory that pays off politicians to keep a store of value they can keep their money in going into a debt reset and doesn't require larping as a decentralization project and therefore saves billions a year in validator fees" and unlike BTC or SOL where the miners and validators dump, the Ripple Market maker is god tier at architecting the number to go up (so long as it can avoid regulatory jack hammers, which is more or less basically locked in) So that's the position of max cynicism. Where I got interested in it (I am working on a hard fork of Ripple). Was in a different vein than the original vision of replacing SWIFT. I.e. XRP is a giant *messaging machine* A> Financial rails need to be replaced B. We are all sending a metric shitload of messages to machines bc of AI-everything. This is where the Internet of Value angle takes a sort of interesting philosophical Landian turn -- or where I think it's very interesting 1. The internet wasn't really profitable outside of selling addictive slop (society didn't improve that much vs the mid 1990s, other than the addiction tech). But the internet enabled vast amounts of non economic behavior. Like everyone uploading everything to Libgen. Or limewire. Just massive training data 2. And this collective internet enabled the creation of AI itself. So the most rtrded and illegal parts of the internet ended up being the interesting ones But there is now a final value layer. Which originally was posited by Chris Larsen. That is to say "the internet of value". where money should move around on the internet the same way that ideas do But the way that ideas move around the internet has changed fundamentally, bc now - the internet is basically gated by messaging platforms (LLMs) as a default UX So there's a third configuration of the evolution of technology which is The Internet of Value - which in my opinion is The Internet of Speculation And XRP itself is basically a group of speculators dancing around an open source technology which has the benefit of being first. So my project sort of takes that concept to an even more extreme conclusion that 1. SWIFT is never going to be replaced by XRP 2. But also that smart contracts are probably a waste 3. Supply control is good 4. Ripple is probably unnecessarily centralizing and we can build good technical solutions that make the XRPL foundation fully programattic 5. The resulting messaging architecture can be a useful ontology for a large number of ppl to work together and speculate i.e. the "new SWIFT" is a messaging system btwn users and an AI hive mind. That's what I spend my time building so I have a lot of familiarity w XRP bc we are neck deep in changing various features, forking RippleD properly etc, while also shifting the foundation structure legally and all that fun stuff so it's complex Ripple is "correct". XRP is "correct". The reason why we're in a crypto bull run is bc the government allowed this to be the case. And ultimately the USD is dubious collateral for international transactions. + Ripple has great supply control structurally and is a sound blockchain for the maximally cynical debt jubilee and Bretton Woods 3 But XRP is also deeply incorrect insofar as 1] the US will never allow SWIFT to be replaced given Russia / Ukraine 2] Nobody will use XRP for what it's intended to therefore unless 3] XRP actually complies with OFAC which it's architecturally incapable of doing and 4] XRP is more interesting as a speculative mass (the XRP army) than it is as a blockchain asset hence the fork - but at the end of the day, I think it's an interesting, and under studied asset and spend a lot of time thinking about it anyways good luck w things
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