Thread by @dewar_phil

WHAT IS PLAN B? In late 2018, things were looking up for the XRP price. The insiders and riddlers were all predicting huge things for EOY. What happened? (Warning: Wild speculation ahead). THREAD:

2) Absolutely nothing happened! The Ripple Riddler didn't ride in on a green-eyed bull on Nov 5th. And there was much wailing and infighting among XRP holders who believed vs. those who didn't (or who did but were disappointed).

3) Then early in 2019, the official Ripple Riddler Twitter account @RippleRiddler posted a short but cryptic message: "Get ready for Plan B". But what went wrong with Plan A?

4) Imagine a hypothetical world where the switch is thrown on a new paradigm: The Lumen $XLM is the single unified world currency, used to buy milk and pay your mortgage, while XRP is used for liquidity to transact in the quadrillion$+ derivatives market.

5) To reach the transaction rate required to fill this role (including microtransactions), the Stellar XLM network would have to scale to a TPS rate of 100,000 or more (and that's low-balling it). It can't do this presently.

6) A workable 2nd-level transaction layer would need to be developed, like the Lightning Network. But in 2018 Stellar was hard at work on such a project, codenamed "Starlight". Stellar intended to have Starlight ready in...December 2018.

medium.com/interstellar/s…

7) Starlight wasn't completed in December 2018, or ever - it seems to be dead in the water, with Github activity once in a blue moon: github.com/interstellar/s…. In fact, it seems that Stellar hasn't really been having much luck in general lately with their ambitiions.

8) With no way to scale the Lumen to the masses, perhaps this paradigm was put on hold. Enter an interim world, where governments could hold onto their fiscal sovereignty a little while longer, until the tech is ready.

9) A world of fiat money backed by precious metals, in digital form - with XRP as a bridge between them.

10) Bear in mind that this only delays the inevitable. With XRP as a bridge, and easily pumped to high value thanks to the small crypto market, the legacy financial system would see a nice injection of trillions in XRP liquidity to maintain the status quo - for a while, at least

11) If governments continue to overspend and over leverage themselves however, the debt bubble will still burst again several years down the road.

12) A big enough crisis would still then require a complete re-org of the world financial system, under a world body that would issue a single currency and manage monetary policy for the global good. By that time, will the "Plan A" tech be ready? /THREAD

DISCLAIMER: Despite any setbacks, I personally believe in XLM. Between IBM, and its general mission to "bank the unbanked", it may capture a significant share of the payments market in the medium term.