Improving global settlement with blockchain tech. CTO at Ripple; one of the original architects of the XRP ledger.
14 subscribed
Dec 8, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
As many of you know, I sold 40,000 ETH at about $1 to put solar panels on a house I no longer own. That ETH was worth over $100 million shortly after. 1/5
My father, ironically, did almost the same thing. After my older siblings moved out, my parents didn't need the enormous house we were living in. But it needed quite a bit of fixing up to sell. 2/5
Apr 13, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
@ScamDetective5 Sure. 1. XRPL certainly needs the Internet for now and the foreseeable future. 2. No CBDCs on XRPL right now. ...
@ScamDetective5 ... 3. We've never seen 1,500 TPS on the live XRPL. I suspect it could, as currently configured, probably sustain about 300-500. 4. While someone could create a basket containing XRP, the only current reason to do so I can think of is as for cryptocurrency index exposure. ...
Mar 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I've gotten some criticism recently for not calling out scams more than I do. I'd like to share some of my thinking on this. 1/4
I'm not going to call out a scam that isn't obvious. I really don't want to take the risk that I'll call out a legitimate project as a scam. Having had my work called a scam so many times by people who didn't take the time to understand it, I don't want to do that to anyone. 2/4
Dec 15, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Sam made a serious miscalculation in his public communications after FTX collapsed. Almost literally everyone could see that nothing he could say would help him. Prosecutors will ignore anything he says that helps him. But anything harmful will be an exhibit in a future case. 1/5
Sam likely figured his biggest risk of criminal prosecution was around him knowingly loaning, investing, or risking FTX customer funds. Thinking he could reduce that risk, he created a narrative that he failed to provide adequate controls against doing so accidentally. 2/5
Dec 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Sam's political contributions could have been a brilliant strategy to insulate him and his company from scrutiny, get himself favorable regulation, and so on. But I think that they are actually going to backfire on him spectacularly. 1/3
For one thing, many of his contributions will probably be clawed back or recipients will be shamed into returning them. The contributions are also a source of embarrassment to those who received them. 2/3
Dec 15, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The @SBF_FTX indictment looks very rushed. It's very light on factual details, doesn't name any co-conspirators, and covers only a tiny fraction of what we know happened. 1/5
That said, these are still serious Federal charges that could put him away for a very long time. And I don't think the rushing will do any harm. Other charges can be added later and more details aren't strictly necessary at this stage anyway. 2/5
Dec 9, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
I've been in this space for a long time and I've seen a lot of examples of "contagion" both in the crypto space and outside it. I'm talking about cases where one company or project fails spectacularly and it triggers a number of other things to break. 1/
The first example in the crypto space was when pirateat40's ponzi scheme (BTCST) collapsed. At the time, there were quite a few bitcoin lending operations going on. Pirate was offering yields greater than 10% per WEEK. 2/ newsbtc.com/news/pirateat4…
Dec 8, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
When you buy an asset in the expectation of it appreciating in value, whether it's a security, a commodity, a collectible, or whatever, its present value and everything built into that doesn't matter. 1/6
You get 100% of the value of that but you pay 100% of the value of that too. That constant will have no effect on your gains or losses. All that matters is what can change. 2/6
Nov 30, 2022 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
@Justin_Bons PoW blockchains are decentralized because everyone enforces the rules, nobody has any special power to change the rules, and it is not possible to censor transactions other than over very short periods of time. XRPL has all these properties, but achieves them differently. 1/2@Justin_Bons If miners could not censor and didn't get rewarded, it would make no difference for decentralization purposes who mined and there would be no particular reason for anyone to care. 2/2
Nov 22, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
There are a few lessons that should be learned from the FTX fiasco, but there's one important lesson that is really pretty obvious in retrospect and that I can say with total confidence will not be learned. 1/4
If you hold billions of dollars of other people's money for indefinite time periods, the temptation to speculate with those funds is irresistable if there aren't verifiable checks that make such risk-taking virtually impossible, nothing else will be sufficient. 2/4
Many years ago, my wife and I were going to buy a business in the mountains in California. The whole deal was an incredible fiasco in many ways, but I'll just focus on two of them. 1/10
It was a Friday and we were expecting to close on Monday. I got some last minute additional paperwork from my title insurance company and buried in it was them asking me to sign off on a restrictive covenant on the land. This was the first I had heard of the covenant. 2/10
Nov 13, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This story is true to the best of my recollection. It occurred when I was living in Houston (1987 or so) and I read about it in the paper and saw it on TV news. 1/7
A man appeared to have committed suicide, but his family was sure that he would have had no reason for doing so. They pushed the Houston police hard to investigate. The police found nothing suspcious except a strange phone call to his house very shortly before he died. 2/7
Nov 12, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I'm seeing SBF compared to Madoff. There are huge apparent differences, at least now. Madoff started off a Ponzi and maybe he hoped to replace it with legitimate profits at some future point. SBF seems to have started off legitimate then gradually replaced it with a Ponzi. 1/6
Madoff knew his claim to be offering exposure to split-strike conversion could not possibly provide the yields he claimed. He knew this from day one. Maybe he hoped to eventually find some strategy that worked. But it was a scam at day one. 2/6
Oct 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Thanks to the collective effort of the #XRPL community and @RippleXDev engineers, XLS-20 is now enabled on the XRP Ledger Mainnet and a few NFTs have already been minted. (1/4)
Tokenization is not new to the XRPL, but this presents a key milestone for developers and creators to tokenize any asset and build innovative Web3 projects with utility. (2/4)
Oct 31, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
We need to talk a bit about Ye. He definitely said many awful things and every individual action taken in response to what he said was and is fully justified. 1/5
However, he definitely has some kind of issue that is preventing him from filtering his statements to those that are socially appropriate. We all have socially inappropriate thoughts. I'm sure I think of tweeting at least ten things a day that would destroy my life. 2/5
Sep 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A man gets sent to jail. One night, after lights out, someone yells out "17" and everyone laughs. Someone else yells "41" and everyone laughts. The new guy has no idea what's going on. 1/4
So the next day, he asks someone what the deal is with the numbers and the laughing. The guy explains that they've all been in jail together so long, they've long since shared every joke that they know. So they've assigned them all numbers. 2/4
Sep 1, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
A monk once took a vow of silence. For ten years, he labored in the fields, prayed with the other monks, and stuck to his vow. Then, one day, the abbot of the monastery summoned him to a private meeting. 1/5
The abbot said: "You have kept your vows and done your duties well these past ten years. As a reward, you may say two words."
He replied, "Bed hard." 2/5
Aug 3, 2022 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
Defamation and the First Amendment, a 🧵:
1) Sometimes you'll have an issue of great public importance where only one side risks lawsuits for defamatino. Trump is/isn't a liar. Biden does/doesn't suffer from dementia. Craig Wright is/isn't Satoshi.
Jul 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
@TheXRPClub@bgarlinghouse@WietseWind XRPL is not quantum resistant. It could be made so, but with the present mechanims we have, the result would kind of suck because the quantum resistant algorithms we know of all have painful disadvantages in blockchain applications. ...
@TheXRPClub@bgarlinghouse@WietseWind ... My current thinking is that we monitor the state of the art carefully and implement the best quantum resistant algorithms whenever the risk looks to be within about 5 years of materializing. I don't think we're there yet. ...
Apr 7, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Today’s release also improves caching and has a catch (see what I did there?). 1/6
As is the case when adding any new functionality to a public blockchain, there are some risks. This is also true for NFTs which @RippleXDev engineers anticipate will bring considerable transaction volume to the XRPL. 2/6
14 subscribed
