A Shot at Ripple

The fidget spinner of virtual currency. It gets it nick name from the logo closely resembling a fidget spinner. Also just like a fidget spinner Ripple can out of no where and took the world by surprise. Ripple is the name for both the digital currency, XRP, and an open payment within that currency is transferred. Ripple is still in early stages of it life, also known as beta. Ripple is seeking to break people free of the "walled gardens". What that means is the credit card companies, banks, PayPal all often charge fees for their services. Ripple is looking to remove fees completely while also reducing processing time of those transaction. OpenCoin is the company behind Ripple that is seeking to make it a big success. They mention that the goal of Ripple is to build on the decentralized digital currency approach set by bitcoin and do many other advancements to it. 

Like many other things, Ripple is peer-to-peer. There is no need for a third party coming into the picture and make people pay fees. Chris Larsen is the CEO and has many plan for the future to make Ripple standout even more. Currently it is the 3rd highest rank coin in the market trading for about 90 cents. This is extremely low for the coin because at the start of the new year it reached its highest point at about $3.20. Moving forward, Ripple is no doubt in a very strong position, but hurdles still remain. For example, banks could adopt any number of competing cryptos for their purposes. In fact, once implemented, the Lightning Network will make Bitcoin as fast and efficient, if not more so, than Ripple. It is also possible that governments will seek to regulate how banks conduct blockchain transactions, which could easily interfere with Ripple’s goal of becoming the standard platform. Along with Ripple many other coins would also be heavily affected. In fact, the very crypto revolution is a potential challenge to Ripple’s business plan, as fiat could very well be replaced at some point. No matter what happens you can always check the current price of XRP here.

I don't usually encourage or tell people to invest their money into crypto unless they know a lot about it, but this coin is a safe bet. It has a great teaming backing it with a good open-source so that people can mine it. The market cap is under constant watch with only a 100 million going to be mined and the company itself holding half of that. The publicity on the coin is already huge, but still has huge room for improvement. Investing in this coin would be a safe place to increase your money. It is very safe to consider that Ripple is at turning point in virtual currency. It has huge potential to surpass Etheruem as the second highest rated. Ripple will change they way people look at virtual currency in years to come.

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum

Bitcoin has been around for a while is considered the grandfather of cryptocurrency. It is very well known as many other coins have a tendency to follow with it's gains and losses. If Bitcoin were to increase 5%, it is highly likely that other coins also find there way into the green growth. Ethereum has constantly been in the shadows of Bitcoin ever since it was first launched in 2015, which is six years after Bitcoin's launch. However, it is starting to separate it self from Bitcoin more and more everyday. Currently Ethereum is trading at around $910USD, which is 1/10 of a Bitcoin.

There are a couple differences between the two coins. One pretty big one is that it is much faster than the now outdated Bitcoin. Where Bitcoin transactions can take up to 10 minutes to clear, Ethereum seeks to have that done in just seconds. Also it is much cheaper to send Ethereum than it is Bitcoin. Personally being invested myself, I have had to send both Bitcoin and Ethereum many times. The first time I sent Bitcoin it took about 8 minutes to process. The worse part it also cost me about $10USD to send the value of about $125USD. Ethereum on the other had was a much better transfer. It took only about 10 seconds and only cost me $0.40. After that experience it made me learn the hard
way that Ethereum had an advantage in that sense.

Ethereum is an advancement based on the principle of blockchain that supports Bitcoin but with a purpose that does not come close to competing. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency which includes a programmable smart contract platform. Nicknamed the "next generation" or "Bitcoin 2.0", you will surely hear about it for years to come. All transactions in both are kept in public ledgers also known as the blockchain. Ethereum with it smart contracts, makes it so people can get paid regularly after completing a certain task. Similar to wages in a job.

The way to attain these coins is exactly the same. A computer uses it power to focus on confirming transactions that go onto the ledger. They difference is that Bitcoin is already at 2/3 of it marketcap. Meaning that once it is fully mined, no more can be attained. Ethereum in the other hand has been available for quite some time now and has only 1/2 of the marketcap for it mined. Like many things, the rarer, the more valuable. Prices are calculated to increase for both as they continue to be mine.

What's New?

Whenever I talk about cryptocurrency with other people, they always are turn away by the fact ofhere will start you off with a free random stock in a popular company. Although the crypto trading is not released yet, you can still signup on a wait list. There is currently 1.25 million people who are waiting for the release. This app will be one of the first places that you can go right from USD into a couple different currencies including: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Stellar, NEO, Monero, Dash, and Dogecoin. It is projected to release in February starting with only a few states.

how much work must be done to start trading. However, that might not be the case in a short while. Robinhood, a United States financial service, recently announced they would start trading crypto. Robinhood is currently a smartphone app that allows individuals to invest in companies listed on the New York stock exchange. This is all done without paying a commission. This company has recently released news that you will soon be able to trade cryptocurrency without paying for commission. Currently if you download the app, you will be able to start trading instantly on the NYSE, after transferring $50 from a bank account and verifying your account. Also signing up

South Korea recently announced that they were not going to ban the use of cryptocurrency in their country. This was a huge relief as many Koreans are heavily invested in these coins. Cryptocurrency is so popular in Korean countries that many times they are able to raise the price of a coin because they are buying so much of it. Similar to China they are putting as many restrictions as possible on it because both countries are scared of people using it to preform illegal activities. One of the biggest is money laundering, which if you are interest you can read an article from Bloomberg Technology of who you can hide $500 million. People believe that the United States government might soon start looking into it because as JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said "governments are going to crush it one day. Governments like to know where the money is, who has it and what you're doing with it, in case you haven't noticed."

Recently in the news, hacking has came into the picture. People are starting to not only hack people's account and steal bitcoin from their wallets, but also hacking their entire computers. Since bitcoin is "mineable" this computers can be used to join a pool of other hacked computers to generate huge amounts of bitcoin for the hacker. I would recommend that everyone gets "2FA" or two-factor
authentication. This makes it much harder for hackers to get into your account. You can now usually get a message sent to your phone of a random code that must be entered within 15 seconds or you will not be able to login.

My tip for this week is that you shouldn't keep all your eggs in one basket. By that you want to be invested into a couple different coins. If one drops a lot, you still have the other to rely on. Always be reading about the coins you are invested in.