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.
Like what? That there can be more than 21 million bitcoins without a protocol change?
I hate speaking in absolutes when they are not justified (e.g. "there will be 21 million BTC" is provably wrong ...
You're suggesting the common statement there will never be more than 21 million BTC is not justified, and is provably wrong?
I think you just destroyed your credibility. (it's not there will be exactly 21 million BTC, it's there will never be
more than 21 million)
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.
So the most important property in dealing with money, namely transparency of supply, experienced a
software bug for Ripple?