The thing I do not understand about buying ripple is, what is the point of owning ripple?
The partners that Ripple is gaining are using it's technology but not its coin. The coin is also a centrally controlled currency just like the federal reserve and banking system that we tried to get away from.
So, I can't be assured of profits if Ripple continues to find success with banking partners (because the partners aren't going to adopt the currency / take supply off the market), and it's a centralized currency, and i'm pretty sure I can't use it anywhere to buy anything, so what's the point of owning the token?
And i'm not saying that like "oh, I can't use bitcoin in my grocery, why would I buy it." The fact is that my local grocery will eventually adopt bitcoin payments, but I don't think they will adopt ripple payments. I don't even think the Ripple team is working to gain merchant adoption, they seem to be focusing exclusively on banks using their technology.
Help me understand why I should own the currency
Google is a scam because their search engine is not necessary for the Internet to work!? Am i right?
Well, umm, yeah. Google works to build, preserve, protect and promote the Internet, even though the Internet works just fine without Google, because without the Internet, there's no market for a search engine. So why does Google even bother with a search engine? Because that's where their revenue comes from.
Similarly, Ripple's payment network and things like ILP and the "Internet of value" are not major direct revenue sources for Ripple. But without them, there's no need for XRP. Ripple promotes its payment network and ILP and a universal way to make payments to create a market for XRP. XRP is, we hope, the major revenue source.
This isn't a secret, it's the strategy.
In order to say something like "XRP is a scam because it's not necessary for Ripple to work" you'd have to think that Twitter should be building its own network that requires you to use Twitter rather than promoting and growing the Internet. It's incredibly short-sighted, small-minded thinking.
Stolen from xrpchat