Quote from: JoelKatz on May 31, 2017, 10:52:07 PM

Quote from: kadscuk on May 31, 2017, 06:43:09 PM

To move so called "value", all you have to do is put a minus on the sending side and a plus on the receiving side..that's all there is to it.

No, that doesn't work. Eventually you wind up with a big positive number on one side and a big negative number someplace else. Then the guy with the big positive number needs to wire out money on a domestic payment system or some other rail, and he doesn't have any money in that other payment system.

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If I want to send $10k from India to USA, its a 10k debit in India and a 10k credit in USA.

However you want to track that (using a token) doesnt mean you have to buy the token as well in order to "settle"

That doesn't actually settle. It just tracks debt. The entity that owes the money eventually has to settle the debt with some movement of actual value.

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I could use R3 token to do the same thing as what you propose, without their being any sellable value of itself, outside its immediate function of tracking who is owed what

I don't see how that would work. Say I'm the only bank in the US that uses the R3 token. I have a billion of the R3 token with a value of one billion dollars US. Now one of my customers wants to make an ACH payment. What do I do?

Or say the US payment hub has way more R3 tokens than the Japan payment hub. Now what happens when people in the US payment hub want to move their dollars out of the payment hub? Where does it get the dollars from to cover?

You can use this as a single-currency payment system and as a way to net out opposite flows. But it still leaves you with a settlement problem. The case for a crypto-currency for global settlement is very strong. Of course, what fraction of that market XRP will be able to get is an open question, and it's Ripple's (the company) major focus.

This is quite an interesting reply so thanks for this and taking the time to answer......

Settlement then appears to be a complex thing, because the whole financial system is complex and not as simple as it sounds...settlement also appears then to be a mathematical issue

So what you're saying is using an R3 token with different links to fiat doesnt actually work because there's still a settlement issue, and a liquidity issue, based on the way the mathematics of the transactions work. If I transferred dollars out on a valueless token, it creates a minus on one side which still needs to be filled with something.

Banks using their own token across different fiat pairs (and multiple tokens for different fiat pairs) would also actually take more liquidity than just using an XRP token for all fiat pairs, which has (or will have) the necessary liquidity already, to actually transfer "real value" in terms of being able to fill the void when a minus or plus is created on either side of a transaction

I think if what you're saying is right, it means even if banks used their own R3 token, it would only work if it had enough liquidity and enough people were on board. And by that, I mean not just banks on board, but other financial institutions, intermedaries etc

So, that would tell me that XRP is still alive..unless im missing something

I agree that banks might not jump into XRP without regulation of the whole industry...all exchanges that trade XRP will have to be regulated etc