Quote from: CheekyChappy on November 30, 2014, 11:20:25 PM

Thank you newuser01 and hypostatization for the replies.

Ok, so if I have this understood correctly, 70B XRP are with the developers/investors and 30B XRP are with 'others'. And as it stands, the only way for anyone to have XRP added to their wallet is by purchasing them from someone who is selling them.

So they will not be 'giving' them away or 'donating' a sizeable chunk to XRP wallet holders?

Thank you for the clarification, most appreciated.

I am uncertain if anyone from the group of early Ripple Labs investors overlaps with the founders. Ripple Labs holds the ~70 billion, and have a sizable and rapidly growing team (beyond just software engineers).

Ripple Labs had communicated they were using XRP forgivable loans to incent partners to join the network. Banks are not interested in holding XRP, as a general proposition. At the moment, I believe they have no immediate plans to distribute large sums of additional XRP.

XRP can be purchased on the market/from sellers, granted by the CrossCoin startup accelerator, or obtained through developer bounties. Giveaways are often sponsored by the community and services on the Ripple network. xrptalk.org just added a nice little basic micro-tipping feature.

Here is some perspective on the difficulty of mass distribution of XRP/STR.