Sukrim, thank you for your apparently honest answers. I would ask people to replace "Ripple" with "Bitcoin" to see how shaky IMO it sounds:
It would be very unexpected to see that more than 100 billion XRP existed prior to #32570. With current transaction types etc. it is impossible in Ripple to issue more XRP, so the amount in #32570 is the maximum we know about
Is it at all possible that a transaction type existed before #32570 that could have allowed more XRP to be created, and then that transaction type was removed prior to ledger #32570 being published?
To be fair, you guys are asking me all the time about "theoretically possible", "at all possible" etc. - there are a lot of things "theoretically possible" in Bitcoin too. Yes, it is
theoretically possible that this happened (though I cannot think of any reason why it should have and also have not found any evidence for that in any way).
I hate speaking in absolutes when they are not justified (e.g. "there will be 21 million BTC" is provably wrong - there will be for sure less than that because some miners did non issue themselves all 50 BTC in coinbase in the past) so it might sound more sketchy than needed if I were a bit more bold with wording (then I seem to attract trolls again who claim I lie or try to make Ripple look like something it isn't).
The older ledgers were lost because of a software bug by the way, not because of a conspiracy. There is a slow ongoing effort to still recover/reconstruct these old ledgers, so this might very well be just a temporary issue.