Ripple (not really but in name) financiers have done well in collecting talented developers, keeping them well fed and locked up and preventing them from doing anything useful for humanity. "Here's a big screen. Make some silly icons or something. We need a new deck for our next round." Y'all got fiatted. You want to be remembered for cutting costs on interbank accounting of counterfeitables? Or are you going to get out there and do something interesting?
Banks will not run on public ledgers. They want their transactions private for obvious reasons. Yes, Ripple has helped networks of banks connect through distributed ledgers on private networks (obviously no game changer). But Ripple, with the use of XRP wants to connect these large networks of banks with small banks that would normally not have the ability to easily make cross-boarder transactions. If this isn't useful for humanity then I don't know what is.
Some interesting quotes from Microsoft"Given this multi-chain vision, we see smart contracts as a key piece. Then you need ILP, which is the glue in the system that holds everything together, so that different chains can interoperate. That means a derivatives chain can interact with the securities chain its derived from. In all of these interactions, youll have to move money around. So you will need Ripple for that.
We see Ripple and ILP becoming part of the fabric of this multi-chain reality. Then you have Azure, which is the horizontal computing layer. Well provide scale management. Well make sure theres regulatory compliance for data residency. Weve got all that stuff covered."
Marley Gray, who leads Microsoft Azures Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) initiativeTheres a lot that bitcoin or Ripple and variants can do to make moving money between countries easier and getting fees down pretty dramatically. But bitcoin wont be the dominant system.
Bill Gates