Quote from: Mr. Thang on February 28, 2018, 10:40:29 AM

Those are all good coins and are very interesting because of their performance the past week but what can you say about XRP? There has been so much hype over it the past months, however its price right now has been poor. Many have been giving advise to buy it but now, people are saying that they should sell all their XRP otherwise they may regret it in the future. Just a few months ago, many have said that XRP is a good coin but it's now in a completely different state.

It's a shame that I can't post pictures, but I will try my best to make it clear

I have published an article about Ripple more than one month ago, I'm going to take it and consider the current price and value of Ripple to answer.

Is Ripple a good investment? I cant say yes or no, because there are too many factors to analyze and what could be a good answer today, could be a very bad one tomorrow, because the scenario changes everyday.
In my Udemy course, Cryptocurrency Investment 2018: Invest in Bitcoin & Altcoins, I give some criteria to understand the value of an altcoin. Im going to report them here and analyze Ripple (XRP) specifically.

The altcoin must be present in many major Exchanges.
Ripple is quoted on Bittrex, Poloniex, Cex.io, Binance and many others. From this point of view, Ripple is a very good investment.

The altcoin must have a valid project.
Ripples goal is to change entirely the structure of payments, especially international payments. They take too long, you pay a fee for transferring money and you pay a fee for the foreign exchange rate. This is what you can read on the White Paper: "Today, payment networks are siloed. Correspondent banking connects networks through a series of intermediary banks and central counterparties. Each intermediary adds cost, obstructs visibility and creates a potential point of delay or failure."
The developers of Ripple believe that payments should move like information moves on the web today: globally, securely, instantly, freely.
The project looks good, Ripple Network is very fast and a payment takes around 5 seconds to be processed.
You can read all the details about it on Ripples website: ripple.com.

The altcoin must be sustained by a trustworthy company and competent developers.
Maybe not everyone knows that Ripple is a company that was already active in the Financial industry, even before the creation of the cryptocurrency. It serves several banks, including the $60 billion Spanish banking giant BBVA. In addition, at the beginning of 2018, MoneyGram also integrated Ripples altcoin (XRP) into its payment system. Developers know what they are doing.

An active team in the community is another signal that the project is moving forward. Trust me, the team is VERY active! I have added Ripple and some team members on Twitter and they share info and reply to questions every day.

The scarcity of an altcoin can also contribute to the growth of the price.
Circulating Supply is the best approximation of the number of coins that are circulating in the market and in the general publics hands.
So it is very easy, Ripple has a circulating supply of 39 billion, this means that currently there are 39 billion Ripple in the world.
When it comes to total supply, we need to make a differentiation between total supply and max supply.
Max Supply is the best approximation of the maximum amount of coins that will ever exist in the lifetime of the cryptocurrency.
Total Supply is the total amount of coins in existence. So it is the maximum amount of coins that can be supplied minus any coins that have been verifiably burned. The most common way to burn coins is when you send Ripple to a Bitcoin address or any other address that doesnt support Ripple.
In any Financial market, the price is made by supply and demand. The demand for Ripple is represented by people who want to buy it. The supply is represented by people who want to sell AND by the creation of new coins.
Ripple has reached almost two-fifths of the total supply, theres still a huge amount of new coins (around 60 billion) that will be supplied in the next years, so the demand needs to grow in order to sustain the growth of the price.

Looking at these 5 criteria, I would say that Ripple is not a bad investment. But wait, is there something that Im missing? Of course there is! We also need to consider the most important factor: the price.

Lets have a look at Ripples price at the beginning of each year:

2013 = $0.0058
2014 = $0.0277
2015 = $0.0242
2016 = $0.0062
2017 = $0.0065
2018 = $2.30
Today (28/02/2018) = $0.91

It is easy to see that there has been one fundamental year for Ripple: 2017. Lets have a look at the growth year by year:

2013 = +378%
2014 = -13%
2015 = -74%
2016 = +5%
2017 = +35,285%
2018 = -60%

I think that more than one person became rich in 2017 with Ripple, but you can see that 2018 has started off on the wrong foot. Is it going to be like this for the rest of the year? Is there a chance that the price will go up and form a new high? It is hard to say.

If you open Ripple price chart on coinmarketcap, you can see that investors started to be interested in this cryptocurrency only in the middle of 2017. It is a relatively new market and it is hard to say if the price will continue to fall or it will increase and form a new high during the 2018.

So is it a good investment?
Consider 2 different scenarios: the price goes up and the price goes down.
If the price goes up, the best scenario I can think of is that it reaches $10 during 2018. I cant imagine a higher price for Ripple.
If the price continues to go down, it may reach the $0.15-$0.30 range that has characterized two-thirds of 2017.

In the first scenario, from $0.91 to $10, it is +999%.
In the second scenario, from $0.91 to $0.25, it is -72%.

The potential reward looks amazing, but the potential risk is also very high. We are talking about a cryptocurrency, after all.
What I suggest is to apply the first rule of any investment: diversify your portfolio. In this way, your risk to lose all your money will be lower.
Lets suppose that you invest in Ripple only 10% of your total balance.

In the first scenario, from $0.91 to $10, investing 10% of your total balance, you get +100%.
In the second scenario, from $0.91 to $0.25, investing 10% of your total balance, you get -7.2%.

This looks much better. You keep the same ratio between profit and loss, but you are not risking to lose all your money.

Hope it helps