Ripple Wants to Buy Its Way Onto Exchanges: 3 To The Moon, 3 Rekt
By: Will O Leary
Tags: Ripple, Cryptocurrency, Crypto, Bitcoin, Blockchain

HODLers looking out into the abyss.

Hit us up on Twitter @UncryptWill and @Uncrypt_Vlad to let us know what you think. Also make sure to check out our podcast, Sunset Crypto, now streaming on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Play.

TTM

I am HERE for Lightning Network, and you should be too. A wallet that is super fast and makes it cheap and easy to pay with Bitcoin? Hook it up straight to my veins.

You’ll hear a lot both from Uncrypt and other (lesser) media sources about adoption being critical to the future of crypto, but I don’t know that we hear enough about practical usability. Solutions like the Eclair Wallet are a step in the right direction and they use the technology that, in this humble blogger’s opinion, is the most likely answer to questions of scale.

It’ll be interesting to see how other services attach themselves to Lightning Network, but the more real and practical applications we get, the less ammunition the doubters will have.

Let me be clear — I am absolutely not saying that what happened with Mt. Gox and Mark Karpeles’ role in the disaster was a good thing. From my view, he falsified records that masked just how badly the exchange had been hacked. (Vladislav Ginzburg might be a bit more sympathetic, but I’ll let him comment on that). What I do support is someone who very obviously made a bad, fraudulent decision putting himself in the public eye and the line of fire by going through a Reddit AMA. You could make the argument that Karpeles should stay out of the public eye for his misdeeds, but I think it’s better and more valuable to today’s leading exchanges to be reminded of what can happen as a result of flying too close to the sun.

Also, I asked him a question and he wrote a response that I definitely wouldn’t call an answer, so I am sending myself To The Moon for my elite question-asking skillz.

Natural segue here. Exchanges need to make sure that they’re squeaky clean and maybe stories like this will finally serve as a wake up call.

Rekt

Oh, Ripple. This is really not a great look for Ripple or Coinbase, and will certainly embolden principled cryptoids who see XRP as the asset class of the banking cartel. We already went through a similar case with Coinbase’s shady Bitcoin Cash launch and well-known, well-researched people like Bitfinex’ed will point out that BCH wasn’t the first coin to end up on the exchange under suspicious circumstances. (Personally, I’m more inclined to believe allegations around BCH than LTC, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless).

For Ripple, this reeks of desperation and the wrong kind of motives. For Coinbase and Gemini, you just can’t convince me that listing on their exchanges should be for sale like this. Credit to them (I guess) for not doing the deal, but the appearance is telling enough.

While I’m all for educating people on crypto, the fact that this is being taught at elite business schools like Stanford just feels wrong. Why should someone need to go to one of the most exclusive and expensive academic institutions in the world to keep up with the industry? It’s not lost on me that this was in response to student demand, but a space that’s all about decentralizing the control that established entities enjoy feels cheated by a top MBA program that is effectively trying to future-proof itself from disruption. It’s not very pragmatic to expect everyone to proactively educate themselves on crypto by crawling through Reddit, Twitter, and other sources, but there’s got to be a better solution than making business school the source of truth for the space.

This just in — human invention has flaws. In all seriousness, 51% attacks are probably the most dangerous thing that could happen to a given blockchain. Verge has struggled with some less than ideal press even if not all of it is fair, so let’s hope that its upcoming hard fork will have the desired effect and shore things up. Funny enough, the market for Verge is actually in a bull trend despite the security issue.