CryptoGram_0001: January 2, 2018

Currently in the crypto space it can be difficult to remember what you have discussed or been thinking from one week to the next. The rapid development of, and many changes in the space keep everyone on their toes. Now that I have been financially involved in the space for roughly a year, I realize that I would love to have my thoughts from 2017 written down somewhere. I believe having this information will help me stay focused, avoid repeating past mistakes, and hopefully help some other people, (anyone who decides to read this,) from making those same mistakes or possibly.

Briefly, I need a place to record my train of thought and that place will now be dubbed "Crypt-o-Gram"

My initial thoughts on the structure of this post will be:

• about 500 words
• frequency of once a day to once a week
• each post will have a number and date
• snippet of top 5 cmc coins for price reference.
• i will always use tags bitcoin cryptocurrency ethereum cryptogram libertyhound (unless of course there are drastic changes, but for now these will be the tags

Okay - here is the current state of the market:

My current thinking thoughts are on bitcoin, ethereum. and ripple.

I have formulated these thought after listening to a collection of thoughts by Andreas Antonopoulos called The Internet of Money. https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Money-Andreas-M-Antonopoulos/dp/1537000454

In this series of talks, one of the many interesting things that Andreas talks about is when a tech is disrupted, first the disruptive tech needs help from the old tech in order to start, ( I am paraphrasing of course,) Eventually however, the disruptive tech will become efficient enough where the old tech actually runs on top of the new tech. The primary example he uses for this is telephone and internet. First, the internet ran over telephone voice lines, now, all telephone calls are routed over the internet.

This lead me to believe that Ripple is the first instance of old tech running on top of new tech. Ripple is the banks way of trying to fully utilize this new technology. However, they are constrained by their infrastructure, making ripple a far cry from the optimum use case.

In other words, banks may run optimally on a block chain, but the block chains optimal use case is not legacy banks. Realistically, bitcoin and its competitors are the antithesis of a centralized system. And in fact, ripple is anathema to many bitcoin users due to its disguise as a "distributed ledger" like bitcoin.

Recently, ripple (XRP) has gone from a price of 0.30 USD to 2.00 - 3.00 USD. This has surged the market cap to be 2nd in the overall crypto space. In my opinion, this dramatic increase is due to what could ultimately be described as a hoodwink by the ripple project. People see a coin for a relatively low value per coin that is being touted by banks and entities they are used to trusting. They combine this trust and the ability to "buy more than 1" as an investment strategy. Add in the rumors that ripple may be added to Coinbase and there you have it. A perfect illusion portraying ripple as a hot new cryptocurrency combining the old tech and the new. The only problem is, it doesn't have any of the benefits of the new.

All of this aside,
I think Ripple may get added to Coinbase so that Coinbase can show some good will toward the banks. This would certainly create a huge surge in XRP price. However, in the long term, I believe this tech is destined to be mediocre at best. It is something that banks may continue to use as younger generations start staying away from banks altogether thereby rendering the ripple project obsolete.

Thanks for reading,
Please share any thoughts in the comments and upvote if you found this interesting.
-libertyhound