Ripple is, as Ripple themselves happily state, a solution for banks to exchange things with each other.
Bravo.
Problem is, in the 21st century, seven billion humans are now starting to realise that we can exchange value (in other words, socially-agreed-to consensus, much like a US Dollar exemplifies) and trade with each other directly, peer to peer, without needing a bank or government in the middle.
Ripple hoping to fuel the continued health of the historic banking model into the 21st century is like a grower of hay hoping to fuel the horse industry after Henry Ford starts selling the Model T Ford.
Email killed stamps and envelopes and the postal authority. Blockchain crypto currencies will kill banks.
Ripple's destiny is pinned to banks.
Does Ripple have an assured future?
Twenty, forty, fifty years from now, humans will send cryptocoins to each other over a blockchain as our way of keeping track of whom deserves what.
Why do I need a bank for that?
Banks were never going to use the ripple currency they were always only interested in the blockchain. Using a speculative asset for transactions makes zero sense to a risk averse bank. The reality is that ripple is a speculative asset and has no real use other than minimal amounts to prevent spam attacks on the network.
Apologies if this is a newbie question but isn't Ethereum very similar to ripple? Ethereum is the technology/network adopted by some banks and corporations but Ether, the currency, is not?
I'm also new to this forum.
I find a lot of sense to your question, it seems nobody has an answer.
Same, same, but different.
Ethereum is a full blockchain. It is an immutable historical record in that it is a chain of linked (inter-dependent) proofs (mathematical calculations in the form of hashes) that cannot be easily undone (spoofed, impersonated, recalculated in a corrupt way). Each current change in our balances (e.g. you send coins to me) requires a transaction that then is evidenced (the nodes reach consensus again) after a bunch of hashing calc's are performed by nodes so as to agree to a proposed update to this inter-linked historic chain of crypto calc's. The participating nodes constantly re-compute this blockchain so as to arrive at certainty that they can 'more safely' agree to a new consensus about this chain, and this forms then the new consensus that you rely on when you look there. The trust is because of the amount of maths performed by the peer nodes.
Ripple is a consensus ledger. It updates an ongoing ledger of any changes, e.g. add some coins to my account entry, subtract some from yours. There is no blockchain with crypto calculated proofs chained to each other in intricate crypto fashion that requires huge amounts of mathematics to compute from scratch. Instead, in Ripple the maths and CPU cycles are used for the work of just updating that shared ledger (recalculating this consensus ledger as each change happens to this central ledger, when you send coins to me). In Ripple you are invited to trust the latest ledger you are offered, there wasn't a huge bunch of block hashing crypto calc's performed (as per the blockchain, ethereum, bitcoin model) that you can now derive a sense of safety from.
At a practical level, in Ripple you as a peer client don't need to download a blockchain if you want to verify the proof of a historic or recent transaction; instead you trust that the current round of consensus calc's (the current ledger) is a correct up-to-date reflection that has the correct current account balances for us all. In Ethereum you can inspect/re-verify (re-calculate for yourself, from scratch) the whole chain for any transaction anytime you need to.
Banks were never going to use the ripple currency they were always only interested in the blockchain. Using a speculative asset for transactions makes zero sense to a risk averse bank. The reality is that ripple is a speculative asset and has no real use other than minimal amounts to prevent spam attacks on the network.
Apologies if this is a newbie question but isn't Ethereum very similar to ripple? Ethereum is the technology/network adopted by some banks and corporations but Ether, the currency, is not?
I'm also new to this forum.
I find a lot of sense to your question, it seems nobody has an answer.
The question you may have also been asking is, why do banks seem to like Ripple more than, say, bitcoin or ethereum?
Given the way that Ripple is just a constantly updated consensus ledger, this echoes the way that banks work internally: banks don't care where each dollar bill came into existence in the distant past (was this stash of dollar bills once used in a cocaine deal? Was this stack of bills used in human slave trafficking? Did this stash of bills come from Bernie Madoff?), banks only want to know the current state of the ledger. So a blockchain is, potentially, an embarrrassment to a bank: ideally they don't want for you to be able to self-calculate from their blockchain where all those dollar bills came from.
The pernicious side of me also suspects that banks want the ability to manipuate the consensus ledger 'after-the-fact', should the heat get too strong again, one day in the future: "explain to me, all you banks, how you managed to lose all our money, again, a la GFC? Show me your historic blockchain ledger so I can self-calculate where you sent all those funds....."