It’s been two weeks since Christie’s historic $69.3 million auction for crypto art ignited light bulbs around the world. Digital content creators of all caliber have been plotting their own Beeple moment, hoping to find a similar fortune like the 39-year-old graphic designer from South Carolina who instantly became rich and famous via the single-lot sale.

Since then, more gambits have vied for headlines. Many are stunts or dada experiments designed to test the borders of the nascent crypto art market and the non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) that confer ownership and authenticity of digital files that live in the ether, where they can be easily replicated. There have been NFTs for the audio recording of fart noises; for a meme based on an unflattering yearbook photo; and for a portfolio of paintings made by a humanoid robot. A slew of celebrities—from Grimes to Diplo—have entered the fray. Quartz got into the action, too, and sold an NFT news article for 1 etherium (worth $1,800 when the auction closed) on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. (The New York Times and Time magazine soon followed with their own NFT drops.)

Some artists, however, are earnestly looking into how blockchain can bolster their livelihoods. The question on their minds: Can anyone make a fortune in the NFT market? Is it truly a democratic platform?

The answer is nuanced. Speak to crypto art collectors, artists, and traditional art-world gatekeepers and their responses echo longstanding debates about taste, power, and the ever-shifting definition of art.

To strike gold in NFTs, an artist must have two things: acumen and an audience. Profitable crypto artists spend time developing their fan base and educating themselves in sometimes quixotic cryptocurrency and blockchain protocols—including how to avoid scammers—apart from practicing their craft. Despite Beeple’s seemingly overnight success, he actually had been honing his digital art skills for over a decade before his first NFT sale. Everydays—The First 5,000 Days, his $69.3 million collage, in fact is a collection of the daily digital drawing exercises he’s been making and sharing since 2007.

Griffin Cock Foster, co-founder of Nifty Gateway and avid crypto art collector, believes it boils down to talent. “I think being an artist is, like, very much its own skill set,” he says. “It requires thinking outside the box, doing something that’s different than what anyone else has seen before in a way that gets you attention. The people who were successful are successful technical artists.”

Judging artistic merit is of course, is highly subjective. To command the millions that Beeple does, it helps to have an institution like Christie’s to back you up. Mike Steib, CEO of the art brokerage service Artsy, argues that the NFT market isn’t exactly the free-for-all platform many believe it is. “Who sold Beelple? It wasn’t a democratic process,” he argues. “Christie’s, the largest gatekeeper in the entire art world, sold Beeple. “

As a whole, the traditional art market remains skeptical about crypto art. Steib, whose platform develops and hosts e-commerce websites for art galleries, points out that despite the headline-grabbing auction returns, NFTs represent less than one percent of the art market. “NFTs are even smaller compared to collectibles like baseball cards, which is roughly an $8 billion to $10 billion annual market,” he explains.

Steib also has qualms about categorizing every item sold in the crypto art market as art. “Art can take many different forms, and I am sure that good art will at times take the form of an NFT, but the converse isn’t always true,” he says. “A CryptoKitty [game] is not art; a CryptoPunk [digital avatar] is not art; an NBA Top Shot [trading card] of someone hitting a layup is not art—but that’s just one man’s opinion.”

He also contests how Christie’s declared Beeple as among the top three most valuable living artists, placing him in the league of contemporary art superstars Jeff Koons and David Hockney. “If Christie’s sold a rare and famous Pokémon card for $1 billion, I don’t think it means Pikachu is one of the greatest living artists.”

The known path to success in the art world typically involves getting an advanced degree and signing up with a gallery that helps nurture one’s career and draw collectors. “The work that people put into becoming great artists and recognized and acclaimed artists is a lifetime of work,” Steib explains.

“This NFT phenomenon does not have any of those underpinnings behind it,” he adds. “If someone is asking Can I just start making enough NFTs in this much smaller market without the support of an infrastructure and an industry? Can I become the next Beeple? I would say, stay in school, kid.”

Marion Maneker, president and editorial director of Art Media, the Penske Media group that publishes ARTnews, sought to bust the myth that NFTs are a democratizing force in the largely exclusive world of fine art auctions. In a March editorial, he suggests that MetaKovan, the winning bidder of the Christie’s Beeple auction, exploited the fuzzy rules of the burgeoning market and somehow inflated the value of the artwork.

“In the highly volatile and mercurial world of crypto, there’s no reason to believe the two masked alchemists cannot turn Beeple’s masterwork into something with a nominal value a hundred times higher,” Maneker wrote. “Buying in crypto currency is the opposite of democratizing the art market. It replaces one elite group, those with excess fiat currency, with another elite group like MetaKovan, those with an excess of crypto.”

Cock Foster, who founded Nifty Gateway with his twin brother, Duncan, believes that the backlash against NFTs stems from lack of understanding.

“It’s probably upsetting to see other people disseminating art in a way that they’re not directly involved with,” he asserts. “Maybe that’s upsetting if you’re a [traditional] art critic. I would say maybe they’re not, like, well understood as an art movement.”

Pressed for a working definition for the crypto art movement, Cock Foster hesitates. “I think the movement is still figuring out what it is,” he says. “It’s a community of communities. Every artist has their own community [or fan base] and that is a big part of it.  I don’t know, I would say it’s very interesting and it’s something we’ve never seen before and that’s because it’s powered by this new technology.”

Absent of galleries and critics, the true champions of the crypto art movement are the collectors who put their wealth behind artists they believe in. Among them is Dylan Field, the 27-year-old founder and CEO of the design software Figma. In a March 12 appearance on Clubhouse, Field professed his ardor for CryptoPunks, a collection of characters that were among the earliest NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. They take the form of pixelated portraits of zombies, apes, or aliens, and were created by computer scientists Matt Hall and John Watkinson.

Field’s emotional speech serves as one counterpoint to skeptics who believe those who buy NFTs are only doing it for the money. He got downright philosophical:

Field explained how he cherished one particular alien from the 10,000 CryptoPunks characters that Hall and Watkinson generated in 2017. He explained that he decided to sell it this year to increase its stature in the flourishing crypto art field.

Though cryptopunks were first disseminated for free, Field bought his for $15,000 in 2018 and it sold for $7.5 million this month to a buyer who identifies as Peruggia, a poetic nod to the Italian art thief who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911, which helped catapult Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait  to its international stature. Field ended his message with a message to Peruggia:

While the protocols and power players are still being determined, some content creators who perhaps are not quite at the level of Beeple have  improved their livelihoods this past few months. Filipino graphic designer AJ Dimarucot, for instance, sold his Nike-inspired riff of René Magritte’s painting, “The Treachery of Images,” for the equivalent of $7,200. His one NFT drop earned him a little over half of the average annual income in the Philippines.

Similarly, Fewocious, an 18-year-old painter from Las Vegas with a turbulent childhood, changed his life by selling his sketches in the NFT market. “I had this little journal called Fewo’s Plan to Take Over the World,” he told Gotham magazine. “It was like, ‘I’m gonna work really hard, bust my butt and sell as many prints as I can.’” With his earnings in crypto art and sneaker brand partnerships, he was able to move into his own place in Seattle. He has sold $4 million of NFTs this month.

Beyond crypto art drops, some are optimistic about the potential of NFTs to offer more equitable compensation schemes for all types of digital authors. TJ Leonard, CEO of Storyblocks, a platform that sells royalty-free video assets, says NFTs can allow creators to monetize their work without having to go through platforms like big stock agencies.

“At a time when we’re talking a lot about systemic bias and access to opportunity, these are the gatekeepers for opportunity that we can now possibly circumvent,” he points out. “Who would be against giving more power back to the creator at the expense of the corporation?”

Because a piece of work can be tracked through NFTs, creators can potentially get compensated every time their work is used or resold. “I think a huge piece of the appeal of NFTs is that you’re now profiting not just from the original economic activity, but everything that happens downstream from there,” Leonard says.

Leonard believes that Beeple’s historic auction is but a case study for how NFTs can radically change how all types of creative goods—from videos and illustrations to music and fonts—are exchanged.

“I really do think this is one of those things that that won’t only impact the world of fine art, even if that’s where the use case popped in our collective consciousness,” he says. To do that, he recognizes that platforms need to sort out issues like the alarming environmental footprint of mining tokens. “It’s like the early days of the internet,” he says, “but I think the promise is there.”

Home Updates Ripple Price Prediction: Ripple can rise on fundamental expansion Ripple Price Prediction: Ripple can rise on fundamental expansion Because of the bearish pressure in the market, XRP is currently trading well below the $0.50 mark. This shows that it is down by 2.92% against the USD and down by 0.42% against Bitcoin. According to Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, Ripple is actually providing a fundamental way for the banks and financial institutions to use the blockchain technology. He further added that this enables the use of the cryptocurrency for institutional purposes as well. As there is a fundamental use, the cryptocurrency will increase in value in the future as well. Also, there are many start-ups which will in the future like to use the ripple protocol in order to develop newer solutions as well. This will certainly increase the number of applications of the cryptocurrency. Recently, there was an announcement by the company that it is developing a ripple payment app which will enable easier transfers using the Ripple protocol. Money Tap, as the application will be called will be unveiled by the end of this year. The CEO of ripple has been time and again trying to nullify any rumors surrounding ripple. He has been trying to induce positivity into Ripple. However, the cryptocurrency seems to be falling consistently. This is the reason why investors are now worried whether there is an underlying value or not. According to the CEO of Ripple, since there are actual applications of the Ripple protocol, it is not like other cryptocurrencies. It has a fundamental value. Owing to this very reason, he is advocating that in the future, the value of Ripple will rise significantly as well. For now, however, most of the investors are scared that Ripple will continue to fall. Many of the investors have invested in ripple at the higher levels. It is down already by approximately 70% from those higher levels. This is the reason why the investors are stuck in ripple. With most of the cryptocurrencies seem to be recovering, it remains to be seen whether Ripple is able to break into the green territory or whether it stagnates at the current lower levels. For now, however, even the words of the CEO, are not pacifying the cryptocurrency as it is still in the negative territory and does not seem to be recovering a lot from the low which it created. Meet Ripple, the world’s most practical financial network What are we, as a society, if we aren’t able to build robust relationships based on trust? That, and honor should be in front of every social interaction involving human beings, including financial transactions. As the world shifts towards a more digital, cryptography-protected way of doing business, traditional banking platforms are being slowly phased out the financial scope. Only those willing to adjust and including more efficient payment system, which is both faster and safer, will be able to maintain in the business and survive. The Ripple platform represents one of those innovative systems. While it has been around since 2012, it is still solidly backing up banking and financial institutions in their quest to provide more efficient and faster transactions that can be built around customers’ trust in each other and the network. Ripple is a project based on small free software that pursues the development of a credit system based on the end-to-end paradigm. Each Ripple node functions as a local exchange system, in such a way that the entire network forms a decentralized mutual bank. In other words, the Ripple platform is a distributed social service based on the honor and trust of existing people in real-world social networks. In this way, financial capital is based on social capital. A reduced version of the Ripple network would consist of an extension of the existing hierarchical banking system. To understand Ripple’s place in the crypto universe, we have to value its contributions to the industry. In addition to being one of the most renowned digital tokens out there – even competing for the second spot in market share, behind Bitcoin, with options such as Dash, Litecoin, and Ethereum – it is also one of the most efficient payment networks for financial transactions in the planet. The Ripple technology is, in fact, more widely known for its digital payment protocol than for being a cryptocurrency. Since being co-founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb in 2012, it has flourished, reaching worldwide recognition and market success via the digital coin, the XRP. Ripple functions in a decentralized platform that fosters money transfers in any form. It is open source and peer to peer, and can work with several exchanges and currencies, physical or crypto, such as US dollars, Yen, Litecoin, and Bitcoin. To work correctly, Ripple implements the Gateway medium, which serves as the link in the trust chain between two parties wanting to make a transaction. Gateway is the credit intermediary, the one in charge of receiving the funds to public addresses managed within the Ripple platform. In Ripple, anyone can sign up and open a gateway that authorizes that person to be the middleman for exchanging currencies. The XRP (Ripple) is the associated cryptocurrency of the platform. It performs the part of a bridge currency to other tokens without discriminating between fiat and crypto, facilitating exchanges between different coins. According to Ripple’s chief cryptographer, David Schwartz, the payment systems of today are where the email was in the early ’80s. Every provider built their system for their customers, and if people used different ones, they couldn’t easily interact with each other. The purpose of Ripple is enabling the connection of different payment systems together. Ripple’s original and intellectual authors are Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, and Ryan Fugger. They formed the Ripple Company in 2012 and came up with the initial release. The latest version or release was on February 20th, 2018. The project is written in C++ code, under the operating systems GNU/Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu), Windows, and OS X. We can consider Ripple to be a real-time gross settlement, currency exchange, and remittance network. Ripple’s first significant period ranged from 2012 to 2013, involving OpenCoin and Ripple Labs. OpenCoin started the development phase of a new payment protocol, named Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP), with Fugger’s ideas, primarily instant money transfer between two parties. By that time, the company had already created its digital currency, the XRP, in the same mold as Bitcoin. Later, between 2014 and 2017, Ripple began to focus on the banking market, with Ripple Labs taking part in related projects. They experimented with an App for iPhone that enabled users to send and receive transfer between them. Since 2013, the Ripple protocol has been adopted by numerous financial institutions to offer an alternative remittance option to people. German bank Fidor was the first to use the Ripple network to allow cross-border payments, in the first part of 2014. American institutions Cross River Bank and CBW Bank quickly followed, and later on, Ripple began working with Earthport. From that point on, success followed, and more prominent banking institutions, such as HSBC and Bank of America, utilize the Ripple protocol to perform operations in astonishingly quick times. Bitcoin, along with other renowned cryptocurrencies in the market, performs its operations with the proof-of-work system. Others, such as Nxt, use proof-of-stake; but Ripple implements the consensus protocol. The consensus protocol validates account balances and transactions in the network, improving overall integrity by avoiding double spending. The system will automatically delete malicious advances from morally shady people looking to send one deal to multiple gateways. In short, the protocol consists of distributed nodes deciding by consensus the transaction’s pecking order through a majority vote. One would think that they take a lot of time to complete. Well, five seconds isn’t a whole lot, is it? Ripple is a decentralized platform because it doesn’t involve any governance or central authorities in any part of the process. While the transactions are all made public in the consensus ledger, there is still anonymity because they can’t be linked with the involved people’s ID or account. All users or gateways have a database of every registered IOU. The consensus ledger that the Ripple system implements is versatile and fast enough that each day, more and more banks and financial institutions are adopting it as their preferred way to perform their business operations. Ripple provides an improvement on the traditional way that banks use to work. The transactions are completed, settled and registered in a matter of seconds despite the high amount of traffic that the platform experiences every day. That is a vast improvement over, say, the Bitcoin system, which takes an average of ten minutes to complete an operation. Traditional banks and financial institutions can take days, or even weeks, to perform a wire transfer, and let’s face it, that delay isn’t going to cut it in our current financial reality. On top of all that, the transaction fees in Ripple are almost non-existent: the minimum is 0.00001 XRP. That’s nothing if you compare it to the costs of a cross-border payment. The Ripple network has an associated cryptocurrency; the XRP, which has the power of liquidity by serving as a bridge between other means of payment, making the exchange more comfortable for all parties involved in a transaction. Judging by data as recent as June 2017, the XRP was the world’s the third largest cryptocurrency by market cap of $11.94 billion. The first is Bitcoin (BTC,) at $45.26 billion, and the second is Ethereum (ETH) at $31.53 billion. While there are no central authorities that control Ripple’s price and behavior in the market, the right answer to the question seems to be no: the platform is not entirely decentralized. That doesn’t mean it isn’t successful, as worldly famous financial institutions such as Santander, Bank of America, UBS, American Express, RBC, and Westpac, just to name a few, use it for operations. The blockchain technology doesn’t allow any party or the network itself to control anything regarding transactions, whereas these banks and institutions, using the Ripple’s distributed ledger, can charge their specified transaction fees. People can’t pre-mine XRPs, unlike the cases of Ethereum and Bitcoin. They are fully decentralized platforms backed by millions of miners all around the planet. No person or entity can have control over them. Ripple, administrated by the Ripple company, sees its nodes handled and managed by the mentioned financial institutions. There is a maximum number of Ripple tokens to be hand in the world, set at the moment of its inception to the market. The said number can’t go higher, which means that there aren’t any new XRPs being created. Ripple and Bitcoin: differences and complementary traits While numerous people within the industry state that Bitcoin and Ripple are competitors, that may not be precisely the case. There are some differences, though: Bitcoin implements the proof-of-work system, which is a piece of data difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify. It has to satisfy a set of requirements, too. In the case of Bitcoin, it implements the Hashcash proof of work system. Ripple, meanwhile, uses the already explained distributed ledger, the “consensus” one, so there are notable differences in the modus operandi. Ripple is owned and administrated by OpenCoin and the Ripple Company, whereas Bitcoin is a decentralized system in which there are no central authorities. Now, what would you say if we told you that Ripple’s traits and features could benefit Bitcoin users? Remember, Ripple is best known and has attained most of its international recognition, as a payment system or protocol. Ripple can provide Bitcoin with more ways to connect with those using other forms of currency, as it preaches expedited transactions and increased stability. On top of that, Ripple is a distributed network and therefore does not depend on a single company to manage and secure the transaction database. As a result of that scenario, users don’t have to wait for block confirmations. Selena Larson of CNN Tech explains that Ripples (XRP) cannot be created, or “mined,” by users as it happens with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The company has control of its destiny in that regard. After a down period recently, Ripple’s value is starting to go up again. This may be your last chance to buy on the cheap! Experts agree upon the notion that, given the network’s popularity, well-built platform, worldwide investing interests and penetration in the media and mainstream society, Ripple is bound to grow in the short, medium, and long-term. For starters, pundits continually say that the possibility of Ripple ending 2018 at a value nearing $1 is very much attainable. You may see the figure and may think that is not a lot, but consider that it is currently at less than a dollar: that would be more than ten times its actual price! Imagine how much money could be made with high volume investments. Based on current projections, most people within the business agree that Ripple’s value can go up to the $200-$300 range in ten years. It is in the company’s best interest if the price continues to rise, because it will make XRP less volatile. In conclusion, not only is Ripple one of the most relevant payment and exchange networks in the industry but also, it is one a prominent cryptocurrency in a world full of them. That is not the interesting fact about it: the XRP is trending up, and has tons of room to grow! Pundits and cryptocurrency experts point at Ripple when they are asked about the digital tokens with the most potential for 2019 and beyond. After Bitcoin, which is the industry’s leader, there is no clear-cut second placeholder. Maybe, we are starting to experience the rise and consolidation of Ripple. What’s The Difference Between XRP’s Tech And Other Cryptocurrency Assets? Spot the difference between XRP’s tech and other cryptocurrency assets. Sometimes, it appears like there is no public support for cryptocurrency networks, but this isn’t the case: at least not exactly. It’s true that cryptocurrencies come in different forms, but they all share the same logic regarding programming, private key cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking. XRP was created in 2012 but has already secured $40 billion in value. Regarding market capitalization, it ranks as the third largest cryptocurrency worldwide. Ripple, the company in charge of its operations, has been able to link up some impressive partnerships for the asset successfully. New reports have revealed that the asset, XRP, isn’t as successful as it appears. Ripple’s other financial products have contributed to its overall value. If you want to benefit from the market, learning as much as you can about the distinction between Ripple’s tech and other products (say Bitcoin and Ethereum) in the market will be helpful. Although Ethereum, Bitcoin, and XRP trade on public exchanges, the method of operation is different. For starters, the ledger and consensus algorithm isn’t the same. XRP as a cryptocurrency runs on the XRP ledger. The difference between this cryptocurrency and others is how the system solves a common challenge. The main problem people face with an algorithm like this is the double-spend problem. Ethereum and Bitcoin solve this problem with the proof of work algorithm. However, XRP solves it with an alternative trust-based system that depends on a segment of nodes to make the ultimate decision. The segment is referred to as Unique Node List. This system allows the blockchain to cope with a higher throughput of transactions compared to other systems that depend on the proof of work. The development and governance, supply and token economics, and value proposition techniques all contribute to make XRP a rather exceptional product. Statistics have revealed that it will continue to rise in value as time goes on. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks Ripple will be a winner in the longer term Brad Garlinghouse, who is the CEO of ripple, stated that his company actually has a real application when it comes to the blockchain technology as well as cryptocurrency space. Ripple is trying to build a network of globalized payment systems. With the help of Ripple, companies will be able to send payments anywhere in the world almost instantly. According to the CEO, ripple has partnership with over 600 different companies. These companies also include prestigious institutions like Bank of England as well as Saudi Central bank. According to him, since there is a real application of Ripple, it will sustain in the longer term. He also mentioned that they will not be victims of the hype. Owing to the real applications, the value of Ripple will sustain. Moreover, it will appreciate in the future as well. This is the reason why it can survive any kind of crash among the other cryptocurrencies as well. According to the CEO, Ripple is here to stay. They are trying to build longer term solutions which will enable people to send money anywhere around the world. Moreover, with the increased usage by the banking system, the potential of Ripple will increase significantly. Also, according to the CEO, Ripple is one of the very few companies which is actually having real money flow through it is a system rather than just the trading money. This is the reason why the CEO believes that Ripple is here to stay over the longer term. CEO believes that Ripple will sustain any kind of glitches or any kind of downward trend in most of the cryptocurrencies. This will actually help it emerge victorious among the other cryptocurrency. Also, the investors in ripple need not worry about the underlying value of the cryptocurrency. The underlying principle of the cryptocurrency is pretty strong. Owing to this very reason, Ripple is here to stay. According to the CEO, it is one of the very few cryptocurrencies which is tackling a real problem. This is the reason why many investors are also looking to invest in ripple. Moreover, the number of banks and financial institutions which are starting to use ripple are plenty. This is another reason why the potential uses of Ripple are increasing as well. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talks at Technology Conference Despite the perception that high-flying startup Ripple is either a blockchain or cryptocurrency company, CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes it’s something simpler and not merely a business trying to latch onto the latest tech buzzwords. “We are a payments company,” Garlinghouse said on stage at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. He explained that Ripple uses blockchain technology—one of the underlying accounting technologies used for Bitcoin—to record transactions between banks. And he said that his company uses its own XRP cryptocurrency as a payment method to make it easier for banks to move money internationally. The hope is that major banks will use Ripple’s xCurrent payment software and related XRP crytocurrency instead of the industry standard SWIFT software to transfer money across borders. Unlike some cryptocurrency advocates, Garlinghouse believes the best way to bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream is to “work within the system” as opposed to using cryptocurrency to circumvent government regulation and financial institutions. “While contrarian and unpopular in the crypto space, in retrospect it’s very smart,” Garlinghouse said. He compared the proliferation of crytocurrencies like XRP and Bitcoin to the advent of different kinds of databases, rather than “one database to rule them all.’ Most of these digital currencies will die out, he says, because it’s unclear what problem they solve. He contrasted Bitcoin with XRP by saying that the typical Bitcoin transaction costs users around $13 and takes three to four hours to complete, making Bitcoin ill-suited to solve the payments problem between banks. In contrast, XRP “is about 1,000 times faster than a Bitcoin transaction” and costs “a fraction of a cent.” For Ripple to grow, it needs large banks to buy its payment software and use its XRP cryptocurrency, a major challenge considering it must convince financial institutions to change how they’ve been doing business for years. The biggest obstacle in convincing banks to use Ripple’s services is that many banks have other IT-related projects that are a greater priority to them than Ripple, Garlinghouse said. When asked whether the large banks will eventually accept cryptocurrencies, Garlinghouse voiced optimism but gave no specific time frame. He said he discussed the matter with senior executives at unspecified investment funds about trading cryptocurrencies and that it could take more than six months, possibly even later than 2019. “Despite the prognostication of Jaime Dimon, this is an asset class that I don’t think is going away anytime soon,” Garlinghouse said, referring to the JPMorgan Chase CEO negative comments about Bitcoin earlier this year. Source: Fortune This Harvard M.B.A. has a sterling mainstream tech pedigree: CEO at Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), president of consumer applications at AOL and a senior vice president at Yahoo. As Ripple CEO, Garlinghouse, 47, has a 6.3% stake in Ripple the company — but that’s not how he makes our list. Though Ripple controls 61.3 billion XRP, holdings that total $95 billion in value, Ripple’s own venture capitalists value the company at only $410 million. Like so many operators on this list, it’s his personal stash of XRP coins, confirmed “in the nine figures,” that gets him here. Source: Forbes Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talks XRP and is ‘Long’ Bitcoin There are few people who can generate the amount of excitement among the cryptocurrency community as Ripple chief Brad Garlinghouse. In front of a packed house at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit for Crypto in New York on Wednesday, Garlinghouse spoke with his former employer about his payments startup Ripple and XRP, the digital coin in which Ripple holds a 61% stake and which advanced a whopping 32,000% in 2017. He also revealed he is long BTC. Garlinghouse used the forum to announce that payments startup Ripple just signed LianLian, Chain’s No. 4 payments provider, to its blockchain-fueled xCurrent platform for cross-border real-time e-commerce payments. He expounded on cross-border payments, humorously pointing out that before Ripple’s xCurrent, to get £10,000 from New York to London on the same day, the fastest way would be heading to nearby Newark Airport and flying the money there. “xCurrent enables real-time messaging and settlement between banks,” he said. Garlinghouse pointed to what he characterized as a “misunderstanding about digital assets” that pervasive today, giving an example from the dot-com era that can be applied to today’s cryptocurrency environment. He recalled how in his earlier days when he worked in telecom, he visited with then-SBC Communications executive Randall Stephenson, who today is at the helm at AT&T. Back at the turn of the century, Stephenson told Garlinghouse that SBC would never use IP for voice traffic. “The point was, he said they had a robust analog switch network that worked for voice brilliantly” and that they invest in data. Garlinhgouse pointed out that today, there is no voice network at AT&T — it’s all VoIP. “I think the same thing will happen in banking. People who are invested in us love xCurrent but they’re not sure about xRapid (Ripple’s product for liquidity.) I can hear the echo chamber of Randall Stephenson,” he said, adding he views xRapid as a crawl-walk-run product, pointing to the four current users that include payment providers MoneyGram and Mercury. “I think it’s just the beginning,” he said. Overall he believes that the Congressional hearing that unfolded earlier this week on regulation and events such as Yahoo’s are signs of maturation within the cryptocurrency market. “For me, it feels like 1997 and the birth of the internet when I was a young whippersnapper in Silicon Valley,” said Garlinghouse, adding: “Regulators are behaving as they should to make sure we have regulation around KYL and AML. There are reasons for that. If exchanges are trying to circumvent KYC requirements, [regulators] should come in and enforce that.” Meanwhile, though Garlinghouse is long bitcoin personally, saying he is not of the came that “BTC dies some terrible death.” He doesn’t, however, see it solving the world’s payments problems, saying: “XRP is 1,000 times faster and cheaper than a bitcoin transaction. Are you going to use a fraction of BTC to buy a cup of coffee? It will take hours to complete the transaction. Your coffee’s gonna get cold,” he joked. Ripple is a payments company that focuses on cross-border transactions, a market that’s largely powered by SWIFT for global banks. But as Garlinghouse points out, only a small number of banks dominate SWIFT and extract billions of dollars of profits from the rest of the banks in the interim. “Ask why Jamie Dimon is saying things [he said about bitcoin],” said Garlinghouse, pointing to Citi, HSBC and Chase at the top of SWFT. “They are making a lot of money from other banks. We talk to banks, and 99.9% of them want Ripple to be successful because they’re sick of paying these guys,” he said. In conclusion, Garlinghouse gave his view of the industry, which he says remains in the “adolescent stage.” It’s incredibly important for him and for the success of Ripple for the industry to mature, including media coverage. Meanwhile, he doesn’t view other blockchain startups as competitors. “A lot of them go after different use cases, like the early days of the internet. Yahoo is not competing with Amazon. The internet needed to grow up. I want all businesses to rise. An important element of a mature industry is a maturation of all aspects of coverage,” he said. Source: CCN Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, the man behind the hot XRP token, said he expects ‘most’ cryptocurrencies will eventually go to zero. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Garlinghouse said that most coins don’t have a value proposition, and are being traded solely on a speculative basis. He still expects bitcoin, at least, to be around long-term as a store of value. SAN FRANCISCO — Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse may be the man behind the popular cryptocurrency XRP, but that doesn’t mean he has faith that every single token will survive. Speaking to an audience of analysts at the Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet Conference on Tuesday, Garlinghouse said he believes “most” cryptocurrencies will eventually lose all of their value. In short, he believes that most of these coins are simply not very useful as a transactional currency, meaning there’s no reason for them to exist. “It’s not clear what the use case is. It’s not clear the what value proposition is,” he told the audience. “Long term value will be dictated by the utility of that asset.” XRP, which peaked $3.31 in January before falling to $0.99 at the time of writing, has caught the eye of investors because of its use within the Ripple payments system. Essentially, XRP is a token very specifically intended for doing fast and low-cost international transactions between banks. To Garlinghouse’s point, that is the purpose of XRP. XRP holds the third highest market cap of any cryptocurrency, at $40.1 billion. Still, some have criticized Ripple for holding the majority of XRP in company reserves, thus giving the company more influence over the price of the coin. This is in contrast to bitcoin, where inflation is determined by the rate at which “miners” generate new coins. Though Garlinghouse’s stance may seem rigid for someone whose company has come into prominence thanks to the recent crypto-craze, he hasn’t written off all digital currencies. Garlinghouse gave nod to the idea that bitcoin — which he says is 1000 times slower and more expensive than XRP — will still be used as a store of value, similar to the role that gold has played for. But it won’t be used for payments, in his opinion. “Bitcoin is going to solve a different problem,” he said. Source: BusinessInsider Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talks About The Reasons For Their Growth And Their Differences With Other Cryptos Cryptocurrencies have represented a revolution in the world of finances and traditional commercial relations. The blockchain is considered by many analysts (stand-out writers of Forbes and Nasdaq) as the “most important technological advance since the arrival of the internet”. having led the total market cap of cryptocurrencies to a bullish trend much higher than any other financial service or asset available in the market. However, since the creation of Bitcoin, many cryptocurrencies have been developed, each one adapting its own technology to the standards or philosophies of its developers. But even though they have different approaches and technologies behind them, almost all of them share a similar philosophy: Cryptocurrency is a mechanism that seeks to counteract dependence on traditional payment methods that third parties (such as banking and governments) have to rely on. And this is what makes Ripple different from the rest. Although it is a software development based on blockchain technology, the truth is that they share very few similarities with other altcoins. In fact, for some people, it could be said that Ripple represents “the opposite” of what cryptocurrencies are. Some see it as the black sheep and question its nature by saying it’s not a “real” cryptocurrency. Some people go as far as saying that Ripple is quite the opposite of the “beautiful vision” that Satoshi Nakamoto had when he created Bitcoin and started the revolution that followed its inception. Despite the negative opinions, Ripple is proud to sustain its growth in support of true “heavyweights” in the world economy: Business partners ranging from Western Union to SAMA (Central Bank of Saudi Arabia) and the Bank of England. Ripple does not seek to position itself as an alternative to traditional payment systems; on the contrary: it seeks to facilitate mechanisms that improve and facilitate traditional payment systems. And that is where Ripple’s strength lies, according to its CEO. Earlier this year, during the “Blockchain Connect” conference in San Francisco, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, took the time to give an interview to Cointelegraph in which he was asked a series of questions related to Ripple’s vision as a company, and his opinion of other cryptos. He sees Ripple as a purposeful initiative, and while Ripple’s website says they don’t have a Roadmap defined, the vision for the future of what they want to achieve seems to have been the lifeblood of their success. “There’s a lot of science experiments in the Blockchain space. I think we are still at that starting line of the Blockchain space, overall. But We[Ripple] are the only ones that have actually crossed the starting line. There’s a marathon ahead, and I think we have a long way to go. But it’s clear that Ripple has passed the starting line. And I think there are a lot of people who are still experimenting with trying to figure out their product market fit.” If you aren’t solving a real problem for real customers, you’re not going to drive velocity and activity in that digital asset (…) For Ripple, that global liquidity problem is measured in the trillions of dollars, I think that people are realizing that Ripple is gaining traction, we’re gaining engagement, we’re gaining more customers. So there’s been interest in that.” Ripple has been working in that direction, making a series of strategic alliances that have allowed them to consolidate as a blockchain platform oriented towards payment processing between traditional service providers, even though many use their token (XRP) as a means to speculate like any other altcoin. Earlier this year, Ripple reported an alliance with the Chinese payment service provider Lian-Lian; and then an important strategic agreement was later announced with SAMA. Soon after, Western Union joined the list of companies experimenting with Ripple, and just a few hours ago, Cambridge Global Payments confirmed the use of xRapid, an XRP-based technology solution for processing their payments internationally. The massive use of Ripple by institutions with so much economic power made its capitalization become very significant, placing its token in the number 3 position of the most important cryptos according to coinmarketcap. It even surpassed Ethereum in importance, but after they removed the indicators of South Korean exchange houses, XRP`s value fell sharply (like that of many altcoins), however, since the last few weeks its value has been rising considerably. Another aspect that never escapes in an interview or discussion about Ripple is the philosophy that sustains its existence. Faced with this controversial position, Mr. Garlinghouse makes his position very clear without any reservations: “One thing that is interesting for me at Ripple is that in some ways people viewed Ripple as the contrarian. We were from the beginning really looking at how we work with governments, how we work with banks. And I think some in the crypto community have been very much,”How do we destroy the government. How do we circumvent banks?“ Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) TAGSbuy ripplePrice appreciation of XRPRippleripple coin walletRipple price predictionripple vs bitcoinripple xrp newswhat is ripplexrp price prediction Previous articleBitcoin (BTC) is Not Worth Mining Anymore, Top Crypto Academic SaysNext articleBitcoin Cash price predictions 2019: Increasing in value tremendously – Bitcoin Cash price analysis USD / BCH Andreas Kaplanhttps://smartereum.comAndreas Kaplan is a freelance cryptocurrency and blockchain writer. block_td_uid_3_5c5355569547d.id = "td_uid_3_5c5355569547d"; block_td_uid_3_5c5355569547d.atts = _5c5355569547d_rand_style"}'; block_td_uid_3_5c5355569547d.td_column_number = "3"; block_td_uid_3_5c5355569547d.block_type = "td_block_related_posts"; block_td_uid_3_5c5355569547d.ajax_pagination_infinite_stop = ""; Cons and Pros of Ripple: Meet Ripple, the world’s most practical financial network ConsenSys, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, ICO ’s and smart contracts (Ethereum Price Forecast) Litecoin Cash Predictions: Why is Litecoin fork Litecoin Cash rising? 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Home Updates Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks Ripple will be a winner in the... Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks Ripple will be a winner in the longer term / Ripple News Today eval(ez_write_tag([[580,400],'smartereum_com-box-3','ezslot_1'])); Brad Garlinghouse, who is the CEO of ripple, stated that his company actually has a real application when it comes to the blockchain technology as well as cryptocurrency space. Ripple is trying to build a network of globalized payment systems. With the help of Ripple, companies will be able to send payments anywhere in the world almost instantly. According to the CEO, ripple has partnership with over 600 different companies. These companies also include prestigious institutions like Bank of England as well as Saudi Central bank. According to him, since there is a real application of Ripple, it will sustain in the longer term. He also mentioned that they will not be victims of the hype. Owing to the real applications, the value of Ripple will sustain. Moreover, it will appreciate in the future as well. This is the reason why it can survive any kind of crash among the other cryptocurrencies as well. ])); According to the CEO, Ripple is here to stay. They are trying to build longer term solutions which will enable people to send money anywhere around the world. Moreover, with the increased usage by the banking system, the potential of Ripple will increase significantly. Also, according to the CEO, Ripple is one of the very few companies which is actually having real money flow through it is a system rather than just the trading money. This is the reason why the CEO believes that Ripple is here to stay over the longer term. CEO believes that Ripple will sustain any kind of glitches or any kind of downward trend in most of the cryptocurrencies. This will actually help it emerge victorious among the other cryptocurrency. Also, the investors in ripple need not worry about the underlying value of the cryptocurrency. The underlying principle of the cryptocurrency is pretty strong. Owing to this very reason, Ripple is here to stay. According to the CEO, it is one of the very few cryptocurrencies which is tackling a real problem. This is the reason why many investors are also looking to invest in ripple. Moreover, the number of banks and financial institutions which are starting to use ripple are plenty. This is another reason why the potential uses of Ripple are increasing as lot_2'])); Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talk at Technology Conference Despite the perception that high-flying startup Ripple is either a blockchain or cryptocurrency company, CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes it’s something simpler and not merely a business trying to latch onto the latest tech 5'])); “We are a payments company,” Garlinghouse said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. He explained that Ripple uses blockchain technology—one of the underlying accounting technologies used for Bitcoin—to record transactions between banks. And he said that his company uses its own XRP cryptocurrency as a payment method to make it easier for banks to move money internationally. The hope is that major banks will use Ripple’s xCurrent payment software and related XRP crytocurrency instead of the industry standard SWIFT software to transfer money across borders. Unlike some cryptocurrency advocates, Garlinghouse believes the best way to bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream is to “work within the system” as opposed to using cryptocurrency to circumvent government regulation and financial institutions. “While contrarian and unpopular in the crypto space, in retrospect it’s very smart,” Garlinghouse said. He compared the proliferation of crytocurrencies like XRP and Bitcoin to the advent of different kinds of databases, rather than “one database to rule them all.’ Most of these digital currencies will die out, he says, because it’s unclear what problem they solve. He contrasted Bitcoin with XRP by saying that the typical Bitcoin transaction costs users around $13 and takes three to four hours to complete, making Bitcoin ill-suited to solve the payments problem between banks. In contrast, XRP “is about 1,000 times faster than a Bitcoin transaction” and costs “a fraction of a _8'])); For Ripple to grow, it needs large banks to buy its payment software and use its XRP cryptocurrency, a major challenge considering it must convince financial institutions to change how they’ve been doing business for years. The biggest obstacle in convincing banks to use Ripple’s services is that many banks have other IT-related projects that are a greater priority to them than Ripple, Garlinghouse said. When asked whether the large banks will eventually accept cryptocurrencies, Garlinghouse voiced optimism but gave no specific time frame. He said he discussed the matter with senior executives at unspecified investment funds about trading cryptocurrencies and that it could take more than six months, possibly even later than 2019. “Despite the prognostication of Jaime Dimon, this is an asset class that I don’t think is going away anytime soon,” Garlinghouse said, referring to the JPMorgan Chase CEO negative comments about Bitcoin earlier this year. Source: Fortune This Harvard M.B.A. has a sterling mainstream tech pedigree: CEO at Hightail (formerly YouSendIt), president of consumer applications at AOL and a senior vice president at Yahoo. As Ripple CEO, Garlinghouse, 47, has a 6.3% stake in Ripple the company — but that’s not how he makes our list. Though Ripple controls 61.3 billion XRP, holdings that total $95 billion in value, Ripple’s own venture capitalists value the company at only $410 million. Like so many operators on this list, it’s his personal stash of XRP coins, confirmed “in the nine figures,” that gets him here. Source: ','ezslot_9'])); Meet Ripple, the world’s most practical financial network What are we, as a society, if we aren’t able to build robust relationships based on trust? That, and honor should be in front of every social interaction involving human beings, including financial transactions. As the world shifts towards a more digital, cryptography-protected way of doing business, traditional banking platforms are being slowly phased out the financial scope. Only those willing to adjust and including more efficient payment system, which is both faster and safer, will be able to maintain in the business and survive. The Ripple platform represents one of those innovative systems. While it has been around since 2012, it is still solidly backing up banking and financial institutions in their quest to provide more efficient and faster transactions that can be built around customers’ trust in each other and the network. Ripple is a project based on small free software that pursues the development of a credit system based on the end-to-end paradigm. Each Ripple node functions as a local exchange system, in such a way that the entire network forms a decentralized mutual bank. In other words, the Ripple platform is a distributed social service based on the honor and trust of existing people in real-world social networks. In this way, financial capital is based on social capital. A reduced version of the Ripple network would consist of an extension of the existing hierarchical banking system. To understand Ripple’s place in the crypto universe, we have to value its contributions to the industry. In addition to being one of the most renowned digital tokens out there – even competing for the second spot in market share, behind Bitcoin, with options such as Dash, Litecoin, and Ethereum – it is also one of the most efficient payment networks for financial transactions in the planet. The Ripple technology is, in fact, more widely known for its digital payment protocol than for being a cryptocurrency. Since being co-founded by Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb in 2012, it has flourished, reaching worldwide recognition and market success via the digital coin, the XRP. Ripple functions in a decentralized platform that fosters money transfers in any form. It is open source and peer to peer, and can work with several exchanges and currencies, physical or crypto, such as US dollars, Yen, Litecoin, and Bitcoin. To work correctly, Ripple implements the Gateway medium, which serves as the link in the trust chain between two parties wanting to make a transaction. Gateway is the credit intermediary, the one in charge of receiving the funds to public addresses managed within the Ripple platform. In Ripple, anyone can sign up and open a gateway that authorizes that person to be the middleman for exchanging currencies. The XRP (Ripple) is the associated cryptocurrency of the platform. It performs the part of a bridge currency to other tokens without discriminating between fiat and crypto, facilitating exchanges between different coins. According to Ripple’s chief cryptographer, David Schwartz, the payment systems of today are where the email was in the early ’80s. Every provider built their system for their customers, and if people used different ones, they couldn’t easily interact with each other. The purpose of Ripple is enabling the connection of different payment systems together. Ripple’s original and intellectual authors are Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, and Ryan Fugger. They formed the Ripple Company in 2012 and came up with the initial release. The latest version or release was on February 20th, 2018. The project is written in C++ code, under the operating systems GNU/Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu), Windows, and OS X. We can consider Ripple to be a real-time gross settlement, currency exchange, and remittance network. Ripple’s first significant period ranged from 2012 to 2013, involving OpenCoin and Ripple Labs. OpenCoin started the development phase of a new payment protocol, named Ripple Transaction Protocol (RTXP), with Fugger’s ideas, primarily instant money transfer between two parties. By that time, the company had already created its digital currency, the XRP, in the same mold as Bitcoin. Later, between 2014 and 2017, Ripple began to focus on the banking market, with Ripple Labs taking part in related projects. They experimented with an App for iPhone that enabled users to send and receive transfer between them. Since 2013, the Ripple protocol has been adopted by numerous financial institutions to offer an alternative remittance option to people. German bank Fidor was the first to use the Ripple network to allow cross-border payments, in the first part of 2014. American institutions Cross River Bank and CBW Bank quickly followed, and later on, Ripple began working with Earthport. From that point on, success followed, and more prominent banking institutions, such as HSBC and Bank of America, utilize the Ripple protocol to perform operations in astonishingly quick times. Bitcoin, along with other renowned cryptocurrencies in the market, performs its operations with the proof-of-work system. Others, such as Nxt, use proof-of-stake; but Ripple implements the consensus protocol. The consensus protocol validates account balances and transactions in the network, improving overall integrity by avoiding double spending. The system will automatically delete malicious advances from morally shady people looking to send one deal to multiple gateways. In short, the protocol consists of distributed nodes deciding by consensus the transaction’s pecking order through a majority vote. One would think that they take a lot of time to complete. Well, five seconds isn’t a whole lot, is it? Ripple is a decentralized platform because it doesn’t involve any governance or central authorities in any part of the process. While the transactions are all made public in the consensus ledger, there is still anonymity because they can’t be linked with the involved people’s ID or account. All users or gateways have a database of every registered IOU. The consensus ledger that the Ripple system implements is versatile and fast enough that each day, more and more banks and financial institutions are adopting it as their preferred way to perform their business operations. Ripple provides an improvement on the traditional way that banks use to work. The transactions are completed, settled and registered in a matter of seconds despite the high amount of traffic that the platform experiences every day. That is a vast improvement over, say, the Bitcoin system, which takes an average of ten minutes to complete an operation. Traditional banks and financial institutions can take days, or even weeks, to perform a wire transfer, and let’s face it, that delay isn’t going to cut it in our current financial reality. On top of all that, the transaction fees in Ripple are almost non-existent: the minimum is 0.00001 XRP. That’s nothing if you compare it to the costs of a cross-border payment. The Ripple network has an associated cryptocurrency; the XRP, which has the power of liquidity by serving as a bridge between other means of payment, making the exchange more comfortable for all parties involved in a transaction. While there are no central authorities that control Ripple’s price and behavior in the market, the right answer to the question seems to be no: the platform is not entirely decentralized. That doesn’t mean it isn’t successful, as worldly famous financial institutions such as Santander, Bank of America, UBS, American Express, RBC, and Westpac, just to name a few, use it for operations. The blockchain technology doesn’t allow any party or the network itself to control anything regarding transactions, whereas these banks and institutions, using the Ripple’s distributed ledger, can charge their specified transaction fees. People can’t pre-mine XRPs, unlike the cases of Ethereum and Bitcoin. They are fully decentralized platforms backed by millions of miners all around the planet. No person or entity can have control over them. Ripple, administrated by the Ripple company, sees its nodes handled and managed by the mentioned financial institutions. There is a maximum number of Ripple tokens to be hand in the world, set at the moment of its inception to the market. The said number can’t go higher, which means that there aren’t any new XRPs being created. Ripple and Bitcoin: differences and complementary traits While numerous people within the industry state that Bitcoin and Ripple are competitors, that may not be precisely the case. There are some differences, though: Bitcoin implements the proof-of-work system, which is a piece of data difficult (costly, time-consuming) to produce but easy for others to verify. It has to satisfy a set of requirements, too. In the case of Bitcoin, it implements the Hashcash proof of work system. Ripple, meanwhile, uses the already explained distributed ledger, the “consensus” one, so there are notable differences in the modus operandi. Ripple is owned and administrated by OpenCoin and the Ripple Company, whereas Bitcoin is a decentralized system in which there are no central authorities. Now, what would you say if we told you that Ripple’s traits and features could benefit Bitcoin users? Remember, Ripple is best known and has attained most of its international recognition, as a payment system or protocol. Ripple can provide Bitcoin with more ways to connect with those using other forms of currency, as it preaches expedited transactions and increased stability. On top of that, Ripple is a distributed network and therefore does not depend on a single company to manage and secure the transaction database. As a result of that scenario, users don’t have to wait for block confirmations. Selena Larson of CNN Tech explains that Ripples (XRP) cannot be created, or “mined,” by users as it happens with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The company has control of its destiny in that regard. After a down period recently, Ripple’s value is starting to go up again. This may be your last chance to buy on the cheap! Experts agree upon the notion that, given the network’s popularity, well-built platform, worldwide investing interests and penetration in the media and mainstream society, Ripple is bound to grow in the short, medium, and long-term. Based on current projections, most people within the business agree that Ripple’s value can go up to the $200-$300 range in ten years. It is in the company’s best interest if the price continues to rise, because it will make XRP less volatile. In conclusion, not only is Ripple one of the most relevant payment and exchange networks in the industry but also, it is one a prominent cryptocurrency in a world full of them. That is not the interesting fact about it: the XRP is trending up, and has tons of room to grow! Pundits and cryptocurrency experts point at Ripple when they are asked about the digital tokens with the most potential for 2019 and beyond. After Bitcoin, which is the industry’s leader, there is no clear-cut second placeholder. Maybe, we are starting to experience the rise and consolidation of Ripple. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talks XRP and is ‘Long’ Bitcoin There are few people who can generate the amount of excitement among the cryptocurrency community as Ripple chief Brad Garlinghouse. In front of a packed house at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit for Crypto in New York , Garlinghouse used the forum to announce that payments startup Ripple just signed LianLian, Chain’s No. 4 payments provider, to its blockchain-fueled xCurrent platform for cross-border real-time e-commerce payments. He expounded on cross-border payments, humorously pointing out that before Ripple’s xCurrent, to get £10,000 from New York to London on the same day, the fastest way would be heading to nearby Newark Airport and flying the money there. “xCurrent enables real-time messaging and settlement between banks,” he said. Garlinghouse pointed to what he characterized as a “misunderstanding about digital assets” that pervasive today, giving an example from the dot-com era that can be applied to today’s cryptocurrency environment. He recalled how in his earlier days when he worked in telecom, he visited with then-SBC Communications executive Randall Stephenson, who today is at the helm at AT&T. Back at the turn of the century, Stephenson told Garlinghouse that SBC would never use IP for voice traffic. “The point was, he said they had a robust analog switch network that worked for voice brilliantly” and that they invest in data. Garlinhgouse pointed out that today, there is no voice network at AT&T — it’s all VoIP. “I think the same thing will happen in banking. People who are invested in us love xCurrent but they’re not sure about xRapid (Ripple’s product for liquidity.) I can hear the echo chamber of Randall Stephenson,” he said, adding he views xRapid as a crawl-walk-run product, pointing to the four current users that include payment providers MoneyGram and Mercury. “I think it’s just the beginning,” he said. Overall he believes that the Congressional hearing that unfolded earlier this week on regulation and events such as Yahoo’s are signs of maturation within the cryptocurrency market. “For me, it feels like 1997 and the birth of the internet when I was a young whippersnapper in Silicon Valley,” said Garlinghouse, adding: “Regulators are behaving as they should to make sure we have regulation around KYL and AML. There are reasons for that. If exchanges are trying to circumvent KYC requirements, [regulators] should come in and enforce that.” Meanwhile, though Garlinghouse is long bitcoin personally, saying he is not of the came that “BTC dies some terrible death.” He doesn’t, however, see it solving the world’s payments problems, saying: “XRP is 1,000 times faster and cheaper than a bitcoin transaction. Are you going to use a fraction of BTC to buy a cup of coffee? It will take hours to complete the transaction. Your coffee’s gonna get cold,” he joked. Ripple is a payments company that focuses on cross-border transactions, a market that’s largely powered by SWIFT for global banks. But as Garlinghouse points out, only a small number of banks dominate SWIFT and extract billions of dollars of profits from the rest of the banks in the interim. “Ask why Jamie Dimon is saying things [he said about bitcoin],” said Garlinghouse, pointing to Citi, HSBC and Chase at the top of SWFT. “They are making a lot of money from other banks. We talk to banks, and 99.9% of them want Ripple to be successful because they’re sick of paying these guys,” he said. In conclusion, Garlinghouse gave his view of the industry, which he says remains in the “adolescent stage.” It’s incredibly important for him and for the success of Ripple for the industry to mature, including media coverage. Meanwhile, he doesn’t view other blockchain startups as competitors. “A lot of them go after different use cases, like the early days of the internet. Yahoo is not competing with Amazon. The internet needed to grow up. I want all businesses to rise. An important element of a mature industry is a maturation of all aspects of coverage,” he said. Source: CCN Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, the man behind the hot XRP token, said he expects ‘most’ cryptocurrencies will eventually go to zero. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Garlinghouse said that most coins don’t have a value proposition, and are being traded solely on a speculative basis. He still expects bitcoin, at least, to be around long-term as a store of value. SAN FRANCISCO — Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse may be the man behind the popular cryptocurrency XRP, but that doesn’t mean he has faith that every single token will survive. Speaking to an audience of analysts at the Goldman Sachs’ Technology and Internet Conference, Garlinghouse said he believes “most” cryptocurrencies will eventually lose all of their value. In short, he believes that most of these coins are simply not very useful as a transactional currency, meaning there’s no reason for them to exist. “It’s not clear what the use case is. It’s not clear the what value proposition is,” he told the audience. “Long term value will be dictated by the utility of that asset.” XRP, which peaked $3.31 in January before falling, has caught the eye of investors because of its use within the Ripple payments system. Essentially, XRP is a token very specifically intended for doing fast and low-cost international transactions between banks. To Garlinghouse’s point, that is the purpose of XRP. XRP holds the third highest market cap of any cryptocurrency, at $40.1 billion. Still, some have criticized Ripple for holding the majority of XRP in company reserves, thus giving the company more influence over the price of the coin. This is in contrast to bitcoin, where inflation is determined by the rate at which “miners” generate new coins. Though Garlinghouse’s stance may seem rigid for someone whose company has come into prominence thanks to the recent crypto-craze, he hasn’t written off all digital currencies. Garlinghouse gave nod to the idea that bitcoin — which he says is 1000 times slower and more expensive than XRP — will still be used as a store of value, similar to the role that gold has played for. But it won’t be used for payments, in his opinion. “Bitcoin is going to solve a different problem,” he said. Source: BusinessInsider Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse Talks About The Reasons For Their Growth And Their Differences With Other Cryptos Cryptocurrencies have represented a revolution in the world of finances and traditional commercial relations. The blockchain is considered by many analysts (stand-out writers of Forbes and Nasdaq) as the “most important technological advance since the arrival of the internet”. having led the total market cap of cryptocurrencies to a bullish trend much higher than any other financial service or asset available in the market. However, since the creation of Bitcoin, many cryptocurrencies have been developed, each one adapting its own technology to the standards or philosophies of its developers. But even though they have different approaches and technologies behind them, almost all of them share a similar philosophy: Cryptocurrency is a mechanism that seeks to counteract dependence on traditional payment methods that third parties (such as banking and governments) have to rely on. And this is what makes Ripple different from the rest. Although it is a software development based on blockchain technology, the truth is that they share very few similarities with other altcoins. In fact, for some people, it could be said that Ripple represents “the opposite” of what cryptocurrencies are. Some see it as the black sheep and question its nature by saying it’s not a “real” cryptocurrency. Some people go as far as saying that Ripple is quite the opposite of the “beautiful vision” that Satoshi Nakamoto had when he created Bitcoin and started the revolution that followed its inception. Despite the negative opinions, Ripple is proud to sustain its growth in support of true “heavyweights” in the world economy: Business partners ranging from Western Union to SAMA (Central Bank of Saudi Arabia) and the Bank of England. Ripple does not seek to position itself as an alternative to traditional payment systems; on the contrary: it seeks to facilitate mechanisms that improve and facilitate traditional payment systems. And that is where Ripple’s strength lies, according to its CEO. During the “Blockchain Connect” conference in San Francisco, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, took the time to give an interview to Cointelegraph in which he was asked a series of questions related to Ripple’s vision as a company, and his opinion of other cryptos. He sees Ripple as a purposeful initiative, and while Ripple’s website says they don’t have a Roadmap defined, the vision for the future of what they want to achieve seems to have been the lifeblood of their success. “There’s a lot of science experiments in the Blockchain space. I think we are still at that starting line of the Blockchain space, overall. But We[Ripple] are the only ones that have actually crossed the starting line. There’s a marathon ahead, and I think we have a long way to go. But it’s clear that Ripple has passed the starting line. And I think there are a lot of people who are still experimenting with trying to figure out their product market fit.” If you aren’t solving a real problem for real customers, you’re not going to drive velocity and activity in that digital asset (…) For Ripple, that global liquidity problem is measured in the trillions of dollars, I think that people are realizing that Ripple is gaining traction, we’re gaining engagement, we’re gaining more customers. So there’s been interest in that.” Ripple has been working in that direction, making a series of strategic alliances that have allowed them to consolidate as a blockchain platform oriented towards payment processing between traditional service providers, even though many use their token (XRP) as a means to speculate like any other altcoin. Earlier this year, Ripple reported an alliance with the Chinese payment service provider Lian-Lian; and then an important strategic agreement was later announced with SAMA. Soon after, Western Union joined the list of companies experimenting with Ripple, and just a few hours ago, Cambridge Global Payments confirmed the use of xRapid, an XRP-based technology solution for processing their payments internationally. The massive use of Ripple by institutions with so much economic power made its capitalization become very significant, placing its token in the number 3 position of the most important cryptos according to coinmarketcap. It even surpassed Ethereum in importance, but after they removed the indicators of South Korean exchange houses, XRP`s value fell sharply (like that of many altcoins), however, since the last few weeks its value has been rising considerably. Another aspect that never escapes in an interview or discussion about Ripple is the philosophy that sustains its existence. Faced with this controversial position, Mr. Garlinghouse makes his position very clear without any reservations: “One thing that is interesting for me at Ripple is that in some ways people viewed Ripple as the contrarian. We were from the beginning really looking at how we work with governments, how we work with banks. And I think some in the crypto community have been very much,”How do we destroy the government. How do we circumvent banks?“ What’s The Difference Between XRP’s Tech And Other Cryptocurrency Assets? Spot the difference between XRP’s tech and other cryptocurrency assets. Sometimes, it appears like there is no public support for cryptocurrency networks, but this isn’t the case: at least not exactly. It’s true that cryptocurrencies come in different forms, but they all share the same logic regarding programming, private key cryptography, and peer-to-peer networking. XRP was created in 2012 but has already secured $40 billion in value. Regarding market capitalization, it ranks as the third largest cryptocurrency worldwide. Ripple, the company in charge of its operations, has been able to link up some impressive partnerships for the asset successfully. New reports have revealed that the asset, XRP, isn’t as successful as it appears. Ripple’s other financial products have contributed to its overall value. If you want to benefit from the market, learning as much as you can about the distinction between Ripple’s tech and other products (say Bitcoin and Ethereum) in the market will be helpful. Although Ethereum, Bitcoin, and XRP trade on public exchanges, the method of operation is different. For starters, the ledger and consensus algorithm isn’t the same. XRP as a cryptocurrency runs on the XRP ledger. The difference between this cryptocurrency and others is how the system solves a common challenge. The main problem people face with an algorithm like this is the double-spend problem. Ethereum and Bitcoin solve this problem with the proof of work algorithm. However, XRP solves it with an alternative trust-based system that depends on a segment of nodes to make the ultimate decision. The segment is referred to as Unique Node List. This system allows the blockchain to cope with a higher throughput of transactions compared to other systems that depend on the proof of work. The development and governance, supply and token economics, and value proposition techniques all contribute to make XRP a rather exceptional product. Statistics have revealed that it will continue to rise in value as time goes on. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window) TAGSBrad GarlinghouseRipple CEORipple CEO Brad Garlinghouseripple news todayripple price todayRipple usdxrp news today Previous articleRipple vs NEM: Which one should you invest in? (XRP vs XEM)Next articleAlibaba’s Taobao bans cryptocurrency and ICO services on its platform Andreas Kaplanhttps://smartereum.comAndreas Kaplan is a freelance cryptocurrency and blockchain writer. block_td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe.id = "td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe"; block_td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe.atts = _5c3541cef2dfe_rand_style"}'; block_td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe.td_column_number = "3"; block_td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe.block_type = "td_block_related_posts"; block_td_uid_3_5c3541cef2dfe.ajax_pagination_infinite_stop = ""; Cons and Pros of Ripple: Meet Ripple, the world’s most practical financial network ConsenSys, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, ICO ’s and smart contracts (Ethereum Price Forecast) Litecoin Cash Predictions: Why is Litecoin fork Litecoin Cash rising? 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I blog about Ripple & XRP. FULL DISCLOSURE: All views are my own. I do not work for Ripple; I am not a professional financial analyst, and the majority of my crypto holdings are XRP.We choose to spend our time organizing, interacting, planning, creating content, and speaking our mind not because we are members of some select group of insiders or marketing team, but because each of us has a stake in the success of the Internet of Value.  Yes, we're 'here for the technology,' and for the world-changing innovations that will enable the complete democratization of finance, and the creation of entire new asset classes and industries;  and we are also here because many of us are counting on a specific digital asset to drive this transformation across the globe.  Only one digital asset was created specifically to scale and support global transaction levels for cross-border payments.  Ripple has endeavored to be the best at one thing - payments.   And this means using only the best technology to do the job.   As 2018 unfolded, even amid regulatory uncertainty, developers for the large company laid the groundwork for digital asset adoption by banks, improving on XRP with new features such as Deposit Authorization.  1Ripple also tasked computer scientists to research how to transform the XRP protocol to reach speeds orders of magnitude faster than their current levels, while showing increased levels of robustness and fault-tolerance in the face of adverse conditions.   This future code change is known as Cobalt.   2XRP is the foundation of the Internet of Value;  as a bridge asset, it can settle payments in real-time, as opposed to the multi-day service level of present-day correspondence banking.   And it does all this while fulfilling the promise of a no-counter-party, decentralized currency that possesses the necessary characteristics of speed, scalability, and security.  Starting after its creation, many of us decided to purchase XRP in recognition of its potential, even as the rest of the world still seemed infatuated with Bitcoin, the oldest of the cryptocurrencies.  At first we were contrarians, and it was an uphill battle to spread the word about XRP's technological improvements on Bitcoin, especially when so many early cryptocurrency investors were financially motivated to protect its market share.  As time went on, however, the cryptomarket started to wake up to the belief that, to move digital assets into mainstream adoption, support needed to be shown to the innovative cryptocurrency that had pioneered a new, energy-efficient means of double-spend prevention;  and in 2017, we started to see the formation of a loose-knit group of people that were on social media trying to spread the word about this new cryptographic network.  At first, it seemed that crypto had entered a new golden era, but the market quickly retreated into what would be one of the longest bear markets in its short history.   And this is where 2018 became interesting.  Leadership is not tested when times are easy;  when the sun is shining, and the weather is calm, it almost seems as if leadership may not be needed.   What could go wrong?   Even for the developers still working on applications that ran on the slow, proof-of-work technology of yesteryear, it seemed that the market would continue to reward them even if their products worked poorly, or not at all.  Unscrupulous ICO teams were publishing white-papers and then collecting the wave of money that would pour in.But even during the hype-fueled days of the ICO boom, some leaders with clear insight, such as Brad Garlinghouse and others from Ripple, saw problems.   When the bear market continued unabated during much of the year, many companies that were previously flush with cash suddenly had to contract and lay off talented developers.   We heard cryptomarket pundits declare the ICO market 'dead,' after dozens of projects failed to deliver on the value originally hinted at within their glossy marketing.  I grant you that I may not be an impartial judge, but what I saw seemed in marked contrast to the shrinking, fair-weather communities that seemed to comprise Bitcoin and the fading POW networks;  the XRP Community seemed to be attracting more people even as the bear market progressed.   These new investors were wise enough to conduct their own fundamental analysis on XRP and determine that it was worth holding, even through some of the gut-churning months of 2018.  It was a wide mix of people that had one thing in common - our investment in XRP.   Despite that tenuous commonality, we all pulled together and decided to make a difference, even as the largest companies 'building on XRP' were doing their thing.  We sponsored competitions, bought swag, wrote articles, produced YouTube videos, and built applications.   We organized ourselves - quite effectively - through social media.The tide was changing, and now it seemed that the world was watching, even as XRP gained traction with high-profile moments such as Ripple's donations to Donor's Choose, the Ellen DeGeneres Wildlife Fund, and Madonna's Raising Malawi organization.  Those of us that comprised the loose-knit team of XRP investors actively 'getting the word out' were inspired by these developments, and our efforts, supercharged by the addition of multiple community-developed apps and tools by developers such as WietseWind, continued to attract more like-minded individuals.  "Team XRP" is growing, and getting stronger by the day:  Our efforts have succeeded in educating those in the cryptomarket, and now we are on the cusp of seeing XRP transform cross-border payments.In 2019, I predict that we will see XRP adopted on a scale as-yet-undreamed.  Fidelity handles over $7 trillion dollars in assets.  3   4  It's a major institutional trading house, and has managed to survive and thrive throughout challenging market situations, attracting and retaining 27 million customers, according to their own website. 5On October 15th of this year, CNBC announced that Fidelity was forming a new company specifically to address custody for cryptocurrencies, and its purpose would be to execute trades on multiple exchanges for investors.  6Fidelity Investments Chairman and CEO Abigail Johnson stated that:“Our goal is to make digitally native assets, such as bitcoin, more accessible to investors.   We expect to continue investing and experimenting, over the long-term, with ways to make this emerging asset class easier for our clients to understand and use.”The two points of this announcement to keep in mind for the time being are:The announcement is one of the biggest in 2018, as Fidelity represents one of the first mainstream financial houses to dip their toes into crypto trading;  an acknowledgment of the increasing demand by customers as 2019 approaches.  Henri Arslanian, the PricewaterhouseCoopers & RegTech Leader for China and Hong Kong, stated in a recent interview that:  7“The entry of institutional investors will bring a lot of much-needed experience into the crypto industry.  A lot of elements are helping with this process, especially as regulatory clarity is becoming more and more inclusive towards crypto.  From Hong Kong to Switzerland, 2018 has been a year of changes and positive development for the field and this will be continued in 2019.”He also stated that XRP's rising profile as a leader in actual business use would continue to attract more institutional investment in 2019, noting its use by Ripple, which is successfully competing with SWIFT for cross-border payments.  I agree with PwC about their perspective on XRP's influence.   While some cryptocurrencies will eventually fade as mainstream investors continue to turn away from proof-of-work tokens, XRP will set the standard for new crypto-assets that can be used in real-world business applications.   2018 has seen this trend accelerate, and I expect 2019 will include dramatic shifts in market sentiment towards those digital assets with real utility.  Ripple provided its end-of-year retrospective through a combination of Insights content, a Ripple Drop Episode, an AMA with Brad Garlinghouse, and a series of summary videos highlighting the accomplishments of 2018.  The content was provided in a sequence starting with the AMA session with Brad Garlinghouse, and then summarized in comprehensive fashion via blog entries and video(s).   The material was a great look backwards, and can be used as good reference material to share with others.  The individual videos have not all been posted on YouTube, so you'll need to take a look at Ripple's Twitter account to access some of it:  Ripple Twitter FeedIn mainstream finance, some corporations that are in the process of going through organizational changes may occasionally invite scrutiny from news media outlets.   Note the emphasis on "occasionally." In marked contrast, companies that interact with the crypto space are constantly under a microscope.  Ripple has learned how to handle this with aplomb, only announcing new customers when those RippleNet members are ready for the inevitable surge in attention.  In terms of Ripple's customer list, we only know what we've been told, but my guess is that, behind the scenes, Ripple is working with a variety of companies unknown to the general public. With that caveat, let's take a look at where we stand for xRapid at the end of 2018:It's a compact and efficient list to start off the xRapid ecosystem of users at the end of 2018, and these early adopters will set the stage for subsequent integrations;  the lessons learned will help them - and Ripple - understand how to adjust the use of XRP for settlement even further.   This experience will pave the way for further use in 2019.  2018 showed us how important regulatory certainty is to businesses, banks, and others that are considering usage of digital assets to lower their costs.  At the end of 2018, two key pieces of legislation has been introduced in the United States, and the United Kingdom has now shown a recent willingness to communicate exact tax treatment of crypto-assets.  Both of these developments indicate the perceived importance of the role that digital assets will play as a means of cross-border value transfer, and Brad Garlinghouse hinted that further clarity should be incoming in 2019;  while we don't know the form this further clarity will take, I predict that recognition and use of XRP for cross-border settlement will continue to grow quickly, leading to increased levels of volume on all exchanges, and specifically the exchanges that have opted for xRapid integration.  Already, we know of more exchanges that have been discussed in relation to xRapid integration in one way or another.   In some cases, these exchanges have declared their interest publicly;  in other cases, the exchanges have been discussed or considered by Ripple.Here is a list of possible new xRapid Exchanges in 2019:It's important to note, that, even though many exchanges would like to be an xRapid partner, and receive the associated boosts in volume from xRapid adoption in 2019, Ripple is solely responsible for the exchanges which they choose to work with.  My guess is that, like Fidelity, Ripple is only interested in dealing with exchanges that have adequate know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) procedures in place.  This would limit their interest to a subset of available exchanges on the market.  In addition, Ripple is targeting specific corridors for xRapid;  in some cases this means integration with exchanges that may (currently) be volume leaders, if it means serving a corridor where usage of XRP can dramatically lower FX costs for remittance processors and banks.  In terms of the possible xRapid businesses and banks, the list is long, and should probably include any business that has tested - or is currently using - xRapid or XRP to transfer value.  Thank you to @XrpCenter (Twitter avatar) for help in sourcing this updated list:  It's is a mix of large and medium-size remittance processors that reflect a variety of global payment corridors.   The encouraging point is that they've each confirmed that xRapid significantly lowers payment processing costs, in conformance to some of the earliest projections prior to production use.  Generally speaking, the older and larger the remittance processor, the longer it will take to integrate a new set of payment rails in the back-end;  this is why we've seen some of the smaller, more nimble entrants to the payments space move in quickly to seize the early-adopter advantage, such as Cuallix and Mercury FX.  With greater regulatory clarity on the horizon, along with a global trend towards usage of border-less, decentralized digital assets, XRP is on the edge of production usage in 2019.  Stefan Thomas and his new company, Coil, is looking to grab the reins of leadership when it comes to web monetization, micropayments, and innovative uses of ILP and Codius.  In addition, the team understands the importance of supporting other worthy projects and efforts that contribute to the overall mission of making the Internet more useful for all public stakeholders;  the latest indication of this is a tweet he sent out announcing a new philanthropic endeavor meant to benefit the Internet Archive:For those that don't know what the Internet Archive is, or haven't used it yet, the organization is:  23"...  a non-profit digital library offering millions of free books, movies, & audio files, plus billions of saved web pages in the Wayback Machine."I've used the Wayback machine many times while doing crypto research;  it helps to look at what sort of content existed at a site years earlier, on occasion.   If you haven't used it yet, I advise you to give it a try;  you can access the Wayback Machine, which is essentially a text box where you can enter a URL.  After searching, the Wayback Machine will present you with a calendar of snapshots that are available, and you can look at the site content on specific dates.   I've used it to look at the content of the old "XRPTalk" website, which was disbanded a number of years ago.  If you've ever used the site or its tools, it's the right thing to do to donate at least a small amount to the team;  the service they provide is worthwhile, and helps all citizen-users of the Internet.   To make it more friendly for the XRP Community, the Internet Archive integrated XRP payments directly on their donation page:It's a straight-forward approach;  they've established an XRP wallet and published their public key for those of us that want to directly send them some zerps.  It's good to look back on 2018 and think about what the 'big items' were that seemed to bubble up through peoples' collective memory;  when it comes to the contributions from the XRP Community, a large number of developers spring to mind.   Some happen to be former Ripple employees or contractors, and some were previous Bitcoin fans that suddenly awoke to the realization that there was a much better network - with better architecture - available.  When you think of contributions by XRP Community developers, it's impossible to ignore the XRP Tip Bot.  Created by Wietse Wind, a developer from the Netherlands, it made its debut in 2017 on Reddit, and then he quickly added support for two other platforms - Discord and Twitter.   While Reddit and Discord were great additions, the XRP Tip Bot found its biggest home on Twitter, where the social interactions are quick, spontaneous, and fun.  Social tipping of XRP doesn't involve large amounts;  WietseWind put a cap of five XRP on each tip to avoid trouble with money transmitter laws and KYC, but collectively, the number of tips and the amounts involved ended up being a very significant quantity in 2018.   Here are the latest numbers as of December 29th:The XRP Tip Bot received a massive boost in reach and in its features after two other developers joined WietseWind's team:  @baltazar223 and @ThisIsTriss.   The team quickly released a new version of the XRP Tip Bot onto both IOS and Android, with new features such as QR code generation and scanning:After the team made these updates, the XRP Community now had a portable version of the XRP Tip Bot to use 'in real life' outside of social media.   This meant that whole new doors opened for us, including some of the following examples:The popularity of the application was immediately felt, and it's been downloaded and installed thousands of times since its roll-out.  Expanding on the concept of the XRP Tip Bot, both WietseWind and @baltazar223 created an application called XRP Text that allows people to send XRP to each other using text messages - using both normal text messaging and Telegram.The idea is simple;  you start a chat session with the "XRP Text Application" phone number.That's it.   Within this chat session, you can deposit money, withdraw money, or send funds to any other person with a mobile phone:The application is simply structured, and it's inspiring to know that XRP can transfer value over a mobile device, truly as simply as sending a text message!In addition to the XRP Tip Bot, WietseWind released many other projects and applications, including XRParrot, an intuitive way for customers to transfer amounts from their European bank accounts into XRP with no stops in-between.  The convenience of the XRParrot application was something that helped it to quickly gain traction, in addition to its competitively-low fees.  And of course, for XRP fans in Europe, using the XRParrot application was one way that they could directly support WietseWind's community development efforts, especially if they'd already planned previously to purchase XRP.  The XRP Community Blog site was started by Wietse Wind to provide a centralized area for multiple community bloggers to contribute XRP-related blogs.  It's proved to be a fantastic idea that quickly gained traction, and now the site draws thousands of readers every day on a regular basis;  much more than any one blogger could command on their own.  XRP FUD Bingo is a resource created by WietseWind where common misconceptions about XRP are addressed in a consistent fashion, so that individuals on social media can quickly point new users to it if they hear familiar concerns.  Because some topics in cryptocurrency are repetitive, XRP FUD Bingo has provided an opportunity to craft thoughtful, consistent responses to oft-repeated misinformation sometimes heard on social media.  Competition sometimes motivates people to perform at an elevated level, or to set higher financial goals.   The XRP Ledger Exposed is a site that seeks to have fun with this competitiveness, as well as to cater to some XRP fans' voyeurism.  The site allows a user to enter their own public key and then see where their XRP holdings rank in the overall network of wallets.   In addition, the site contains a "Richlist Stats" feature that shows the XRP holdings in various wallets, stratified into categories for statistical analysis.  This is where I access my updated "1 %" number when benchmarking XRP distribution progress.  XRP Ledger Exposed also shows the current status of all escrow contracts, which are cryptographically-locked transactions that will only complete after a specified number of days:The site also has capabilities to show a visual history of one wallet, and a 'live' transaction flow for the entire ledger.  If you haven't yet explored the various perspectives on the XRP Ledger on WietseWind's Ledger Exposed site, you should take the opportunity to do so.   It's not only an educational site with fantastic, up-to-the-minute statistics, it's also a site where XRP fans tend to indulge their imagination about what's possible for their own XRP ownership goals.  One of the projects WietseWind took on that was most exciting for many in the XRP fan base was his effort at migrating the entire XRP Ledger history to the Google Big Query platform:Since that time, there have been many different blog posts, social media communications, and discussions about the results of data analysis resulting from access to the Google Big Query data-set.  WietseWind was one of the first XRP Community developers to work with the Coil team to monetize a website, namely the XRP Community Blog. This provided a mechanism for blog authors such as me to be remunerated automatically when Coil subscribers read content on the site.  This pioneering use of Coil helped set an example for others in the XRP Community who followed suit, setting up their own Coil integration.One of the projects that caught my eye was WietseWind's efforts to connect the Internet of Value (IoV) with the Internet of Things (IoT).   The IoT is generally known as ongoing trend at making every household appliance connected to the Internet, for purposes of data collection and ease of management by the owner.  WietseWind decided to link this with the IoV, using the Interledger Protocol;  the web payments standard for communication of payment information.  It was a simple idea, but he needed to overcome a series of technical and engineering challenges to make it work;  in the end, his project was a success, and he configured a light socket to activate when it received a payment via ILP.  To learn more about his project, you can read about it on the XRP Community Blog site: Raspberry Pi Interledger XRP Power Switch: How-to.  WietseWind provides an incredible example of what is possible by one person, and he is truly one of the most creative and remarkable developers I've ever seen;  and now that he has a team of two other talented developers helping him, I can't wait to see what he has in store for 2019.  In addition to WietseWind's efforts, the XRP Community benefited from a myriad of other creative developers, architects, and designers during 2018.   Any effort I make in corrrectly listing all these individuals will meet with failure;  so I won't bore you with my inadequate attempt at comprehensive inclusion.  Suffice it to say that, along the way, I've made every effort to mention these accomplishments as they become available to the general public.  One of the greatest things about 2018 was the fact that many - if not most of the projects were open-source;  they were published either on Github or Gitlab, making the underlying code accessible to other developers who may wish to access and use the XRP Ledger in future projects in 2019.  Open-source code is important for supercharging the community-driven projects that made 2018 so memorable, and I predict that twice as many projects and applications will be developed by sole operators and small teams in 2019.  Some of the creations by WietseWind and others managed to catapult the XRP Community to a new level of recognition for the entire cryptomarket and even mainstream media.  The XRP Tip Bot's use as a fund-raising mechanism on a micropayment scale was quickly identified and pioneered by @KingBlue (Twitter avatar), who has so far used it to raise a surprising amount of money for St Jude's Children's Hospital:@KingBlue's efforts paved the way for subsequent charities and efforts;  while I won't make any haphazard effort to list all of them here, I can say with certainty that the XRP Community has had a measurable impact for good using the XRP Tip Bot to help organize fund-raising efforts.  It's fun, quick, and convenient for XRP Tip Bot users to either send a tip directly over social media, or to deposit directly into an XRP Tip Bot account.   I think 2019 will see an extension of this effort, and I hope that we're able to positively impact a wide variety of worthy causes.  2018 saw the incredible creativity of a wide variety of contributors from the XRP Community.  Personally, one of my favorites was the short story contest organized (and funded by) @XRPeteSampras.   It managed to attract an incredible number of authors, and I ended up reading many of the inspirational short story submissions.   If you have any doubt about the level of story-telling talent among those in the XRP Community, all you need to do is navigate over to XRP Chat to see some of these contest entries for yourself.  The short story contest was one of many examples of individuals taking the lead in organizing promotions to elevate the profile of XRP and the XRP Community in a positive way during 2018.  One method of helping promote XRP was the passive support exhibited by many in the XRP Community via their purchases of XRP swag in a wide variety of online crypto shops.   Whether these are t-shirts, stickers, socks, caps, hoodies, coins, coffee cups, watches or toys, these articles help raise brand awareness for XRP and its ecosystem - specifically helping to 'break the ice' in interacting with those that may not have yet been exposed to blockchain technology or cryptocurrency.  The more that our community 'creatives' can engage a wider audience with their XRP-related content, the greater positive impact we can have for XRP adoption. 2018 saw the 'first try' at some of these ideas, and I predict that, now that we've seen what a huge impact these activities and creations can have, more will be on the way for 2019.  The evidence in 2018 has pointed to a growing swell of support behind XRP as it continues to draw the attention of institutional and retail investors that are looking for solid fundamental value in their crypto-assets;  in prior blogs, I've talked about XRP's growing overall share of the crypto market cap, along with social media statistics, Google search trend results for 2018, and the anecdotal opinions of various financial thought leaders.  So in one way, it was no surprise that Uphold recently indicated that XRP now comprised their largest holding:It was also an effective way for Uphold to introduce its 'transparency' feature on the corporate website that allows any public viewer to observe how much crypto of each type is held in custody by the exchange.   As they indicated in the tweet, they now hold more XRP than Bitcoin by market value.  Uphold has taken steps to solidify its position as a market leader in cryptocurrency and ForEx trading, taking the time to invest in a platform that is compliant with regulations, and that responsibly operates by publishing its list of assets and obligations on a real-time basis.   I'm impressed by this transparency, and I predict that their commitment to responsible exchange operation will attract significant institutional interest from others.  Gone are the days when unregulated crypto exchanges could rely on a lack of competition to bring in cornered customers;  in 2018, the cryptomarket is comprised of exchanges seeking to compete for both retail and institutional investors. These traders are looking for reputable companies, and Uphold is clearly aware of that trend.  Bitrue is a Singapore-based exchange that has been consistently posting high percentages of trades using XRP pairings.   They went live with support for XRP on July 27th of this year, indicating that they planned on using it as one of the base pairings.  Even at that time, the exchange indicated that they'd set their sites on integrating with Ripple's xRapid solution at some point in the future, revealed during a question-and-answer session over Twitter:  24Answer (Bitrue):  "We are intent to do that but it’s still under discussion.  One thing very important is we will enable fiat currency by the end of the year in some countries and will put XRP again as base token to trade fiat.   And we will have our API ready soon next month so xRapid can integrate our API to enable itself."To me, this was a very encouraging answer, because it indicated an understanding that Ripple would probably look carefully at an exchange's implementation of KYC and AML procedures prior to considering any listing.   Bitrue was identifying these goalposts as early as their go-live date.  And recently, the exchange sent out the following tweet, announcing an expansion of XRP's role as a base crypto-asset on the exchange:Currently, Bitrue is listing as many pairings as their preferred stablecoin (USDT), and the volume level each day for XRP is reflected by this strategy;  many traders opt for using XRP to move value quickly into and out of exchanges due to its three-second settlement time, as opposed to proof-of-work crypto-assets, which can take an hour to reach a minimum level of confirmations.  It will be interesting to hear about the new pairings that the exchange will pursue in response to their informal survey of XRP stakeholders on Twitter.  Bitrue has shown a surprising amount of volume out-of-the-gate, successfully competing with other exchanges in the market, and is currently ranked in the top 100 exchanges worldwide.  If they are used as an xRapid partner for the Singapore corridor by Ripple, I expect that their volume will grow immensely as banks and financial institutions use it for sourcing liquidity to the country.  Congratulations to Bitrue on their recent pairings update, and I wish them luck in pursuing an xRapid implementation.  Crypto Circle eXchange is an ICO-funded exchange platform headquartered in Malta (ICO) and in South Korea (mailing address on website).  25  Its exchange coin is called "Circle eXchange Coin," which is used to fund the development of the site.  26The exchange's ICO is still ongoing, and the exchange is supposed to go live in the second quarter of 2019 according to its road map.  On December 27th, the exchange announced that it would be supporting XRP at its initial roll-out:CCX also stated that their plan is to provide direct fiat pairings, which would give XRP an additional direct Canadian Dollar - to - XRP on-ramp.  CCX adds to the number of exchanges that now provide an entry point for those living in Canada, and because it supports fiat pairings directly, the possibilities are also open for future development as an xRapid partner, potentially.Currently, the field of Canadian exchanges is relatively small, and the market share is dominated by Coinsquare and QuadrigaCX;  however, history has shown that exchange listings are quite fluid, and depend on many aspects of adoption, including promotions, fees, usability, and convenience.   It will be interesting to see the techniques that CCX uses to grow its business in the Canadian market.  During the surge in general cryptocurrency popularity in early 2018, I took two general measurements of the XRP ledger statistics:The date was January 15th, 2018, and now it's germane to take a look at the latest numbers in comparison:  27This is the trend that we want to see:  A decreasing amount of XRP that would put an individual into the 'top 1%' of XRP wallets, and a dramatic, raw increase in the number of wallets.   These numbers indicate that the number of funded XRP wallets increased by 40% in less than one year.  That amazing adoption number was achieved during one of the most profound bear markets in the history of cryptocurrency;  it's proof positive of trends measured in other ways, all indicating XRP's increasing popularity among retail investors and institutions alike.  The other amazing thing to keep in mind about the number of wallets is that many exchanges and applications don't create new wallets for their users;  many of them, such as the XRP Tip Bot, separate out funds using the 'tag' system.   This means that the actual number of new people adopting XRP may in fact be much higher than 400,000!2018 was a year of consolidation, preparation, and creativity for those of us supporting XRP.  We organized ourselves into loose-knit groups of people to promote adoption.   Every creative talent available to us has been leveraged in this effort, and along the way, the community has found time to pioneer the use of micropayments for fund-raising.  Community developers, Codius hosts, and XRP validator operators have volunteered by the dozen, eager to create their own projects, showcase their skills, and learn about 'building on XRP.'And the businesses that champion XRP's use continue to pass noteworthy milestones in their efforts.  Ripple's customer list expanded dramatically in 2018, doubling in about one years' time.   The company has fine-tuned its solutions.   Ripple has passed the 300-employee benchmark, and are expanding further, with new positions advertised on social media.  We know that Coil will most likely have a significant update for us in 2019;  will they go live with web monetization?Banking adoption will be the super-massive use case that will result in utility-driven demand, and Xpring-funded projects are specifically targeted to bring increasing levels of XRP liquidity ahead of this point.  We've heard of some of the traditional investment houses such as Fidelity explore the idea of their retail customers trading crypto;  I predict that when these investors enter the market, they will seek out clear leaders in the crypto-asset space.   And XRP, championed by the best and the brightest Silicon Valley companies such as Omni, Coil, and Ripple, will immediately attract their attention.  The next wave of cryptocurrency adoption will not tolerate failed experiments;  rather, it will be driven by fully-tested innovations that have proven to the world that they stand ready to deliver on the Internet of Value.   Sources and Credits: Cover Art: Thank you to Annie SprattI blog about Ripple & XRP. FULL DISCLOSURE: All views are my own. I do not work for Ripple; I am not a professional financial analyst, and the majority of my crypto holdings are XRP.The title of this blog is in fact the title of a recent Coindesk piece as part of their recent "2018 in Review". I recommend everyone take the time to readThis write up makes up part two in a four part series of articles. In this series, cryptocurrency is a secondary thought when compared to the real world application of blockchain. Part oneStay up to date! Get all the latest & greatest posts delivered straight to your inbox

[Editor’s note, see http://www.iqdupont.com/ and H/T Žarko Almuli] It was April 10th, 2013 and the price of a single Bitcoin surged past 250 USD on the Mt. Gox exchange. A few months prior I had purchased seven Bitcoins for just under $200, and now they were nearing $2000 in value (Figure 1). But, just as fast as the market went up, it came down. Ever the amateur gambler, I panicked and sold too early. But, I was lulled by my humming money machine, permuting cryptographic codes by the millions every second. I was not the only one interested in playing the Bitcoin market, and the increasing price of Bitcoin was due to a number of factors, including a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack on Mt. Gox, and other people like me gambling in the latest crypto-anarchist adventure. It was April 10th, 2013 and the price of a single Bitcoin surged past 250 USD on the Mt. Gox exchange. A few months prior I had purchased seven Bitcoins for just under $200, and now they were nearing $2000 in value (Figure 1). But, just as fast as the market went up, it came down. Ever the amateur gambler, I panicked and sold too early. But, I was lulled by my humming money machine, permuting cryptographic codes by the millions every second. I was not the only one interested in playing the Bitcoin market, and the increasing price of Bitcoin was due to a number of factors, including a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack on Mt. Gox, and other people like me gambling in the latest crypto-anarchist adventure. Like many other modern currencies, Bitcoin is fiat money. But, unlike traditional fiat money, Bitcoin is cryptographic and electronic. There is no “physical” substrate to Bitcoin; the “coins” exist only as cryptographic representations stored in digital wallets. In the simplest caricature of complex economics, fiat money has no intrinsic value and thus requires people to trust that it will retain value. Usually government backing provides this semblance of trust, but when this trust is eroded (e.g., a weak government), value often plummets. Technical flaws also cripple the trust that sustains fiat money, such as rampant fraud, counterfeiting, or hyperinflation. Trust in Bitcoin rests on a range of technical advantages supplied by cryptography. According to advocates, cryptography is secure (safe from technical or mathematical error).iii When applied to economic apparatuses, counterfeiting and double-spending is prevented through the use of public key cryptography, and hyperinflation is kept in check because the cryptographically-secure mining protocol ensures the measured production of money (with a maximum number of coins produced). Yet, as with general discussions of cryptography, complicated political issues often transform into a binary of state versus personal power. On the one hand, when cryptography is used for Privacy Enhancing Technologies it is seen as a block against government snooping. On the other hand, these same cryptographic technologies are often used against the people. This debate is particularly important for crypto/cyber-libertarians,iv who often believe that Bitcoin’s lack of government backing is a virtue (J.M.P., 2013). Described generally, cryptography is typically understood as a means to ensure “information security” or “information secrecy” (see e.g. Kohno et al., 2010). Here, security and secrecy are understood in terms of social relations (c.f. Bellman, 1979). Modelled in its simplest formulation, a secret is some information that I possess and you do not, while information security might be described more abstractly as control of information within a relationship. Or, the encyclopaedic definition: “the aim [of cryptography] is secrecy and confidentiality: the practice of keeping secrets, maintaining privacy, or concealing valuables” (Bauer, 2005). Though the conceptual analysis usually stops here, cryptography also functions more deeply, in ways rarely appreciated by those developing the technology. Understanding how cryptography functions at this deeper level is essential to understanding how Bitcoin functions. I argue that cryptography is central to Bitcoin and yet produces a set of non-secret powers for its social (and economic) effect. This paper suggests that cryptography can be reimagined and reconceptualised, putting forth an alternative to the dominant view that cryptography is secrecy. The long history of cryptography is abbreviated to show that cryptography previously functioned in many different ways, but has been systematically black-boxed. By opening up this black box and reconceptualizing cryptography I argue that we can attend to the history of cryptography yet retain analytical rigour by viewing cryptography as a discrete notational system. Then, returning to Bitcoin, I describe the specific cryptographic mechanisms as used in Bitcoin. Building on this foundation I offer a description of a full Bitcoin transaction. My method for understanding this technical foundation was to engage in praxis, and so, returning to my introductory story about my own experiences with Bitcoin I describe the lessons I learned by running a Bitcoin mining machine. Finally, I take up Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion to “look for new weapons” in our control society. By drawing on my reconceptualization of cryptography as a discrete notational system I suggest that Bitcoin functions as a new weapon in a logic of order. Given the important role that cryptography plays in our lives, it is surprising how little attention it receives outside of the academic worlds of mathematics/engineering and privacy/law. A few authors outside of these fields have explored how cryptography intersects with other domains, but for the most part, cryptography has been a mathematical and legal concern.v Perhaps the most useful of these authors is Kahn (1967) who provides a history of cryptography,vi identifying how the golden age of Western cryptography started with Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). Reaching far beyond mathematics and law, Alberti identified cryptography as an intriguing mix of technologies and practices: the “occult arts,” “mysteries of nature,” “strange characters with unusual meanings,” ”movable type,” and secrecy (Alberti, 2010). Over the next six centuries these themes played out in interesting ways. In the 17th century, John Wilkins (1614-1672) developed a proposal for an unambiguous, universal/philosophical language (1668) after developing the ideas in Mercury (1694), the first English-language cryptography manual.vii Athanasius Kircher (c. 1601-1680), similarly, reworked Johannes Trithemius’ (1462-1516) troubled work on cryptography for his universal language scheme (Figure 2).viii Francis Bacon (1561-1626) worked out a method for universally signifying nature with his bilateral cipher before launching his “great reformation” of scientific interpretation (Bacon, 1762). And Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) contributed to discrete mathematics after writing his dissertation (1989) on the cryptographic combinatorics of Raymund Lull’s (1232-1315) occult and cabalistic science (Gardner, 1958). The richness of these historical themes has now, in contemporary cryptography, practically disappeared. Cryptography has become operationalized and nearly univocal—gone are the vibrant connections to language, science, and art. Today, our most influential conceptualization is Claude Shannon’s (1945) linked notion of secrecy and information. Prior to his famous Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon and Weaver, 1948), Shannon had been working on war-time encryption systems.x Shannon’s cryptographic work stemmed from a long line of influences and prior work (e.g., Nyquist, Hartley, and Wiener) (Thomsen, 2009), as well a richer, multivocal, and open conceptual backdrop (Cherry, 1953; Geoghegan, 2008). Research on cryptography set the stage for Shannon’s more general, and more rigorous portrayal of information. It was in working out the coding issues for cryptography that Shannon developed his theory of information.xi In contrast to much of the engineering work being done on information transmission at that time, Shannon focused on discrete rather than continuous signals (Thomsen, 2009). Drawing on Hartley, Shannon bracketed the issue of meaning, and discussed only how much information can pass through a channel. This conceptualization, combined with Nyquist’s observation that information transmission obeys a logarithmic rule, allowed Shannon to generalize the issue and show that information accords to physical properties of the world (Aspray, 1985; Hayles, 1999). Despite being central to his study, Shannon left his understanding of “secrecy” implicit. The closest we get to a description of secrecy is that it arises from the “a priori probability associated with… choosing that [enciphering] key” (Shannon, 1945). The a priori probability is a function of the statistics of the transformation from one (information) space to another. In ideal situations, secrecy becomes a matter of making guesses in the presence of a stochastic phenomenon. Before Shannon “won” the battle for our history—how we come to think of cryptography—the field of possibility was more open (Cherry, 1953). Competing conceptualizations existed but none were better prepared than Shannon’s for the coming changes in cybernetics and informatics (also made possible, in large part, by his work on the Mathematical Theory of Communication). By identifying “secret information” as the endpoint of cryptographic conceptualization, however, we risk teleological explanations that make it difficult to understand cryptography’s non-secret role in contemporary society. If we start to reconfigure our understanding of cryptography—open the socio-technical black box—we stand to gain a deeper appreciation, and may be better able to understand the politics of technologies that use cryptography. In order to open the black box of cryptography our metaphors must also be rethought. The analysis of cryptography rarely penetrates beyond metaphors, so it is especially important to dispel any mistaken notions. There are two closely related classes of metaphor most often used to describe cryptography: the dead, and the missing or hidden. The metaphor of death is most common in literary accounts, if for no other reason than the association of “crypt” and “cryptography.” On this account cryptography “buries” (Derrida, 1998; Turing quoted in Mackenzie, 1996) and even communes with the dead (Poe, 1991; Rosenheim, 1997). The metaphor of being “hidden” is likely due to the perceived semiotic shift that occurs when a text gets encrypted: at one moment it is there and seen by all, and (like a good magic trick) the next moment it is gone (until conjured up again in decryption). Here the language used is “hidden” (Schmeh, 2012), “veiled” (Cooke, 1983), or perhaps text containing a “false bottom” (Glidden, 1987). These metaphors are evocative but lacking. As will become clear below, a more useful metaphor is “discreet,” in the sense of being circumspect, but also “discrete” as separate or distinct.xii I argue that cryptography can be re-conceptualized as a generic notational system, quite appropriately sharing the ambiguous name “code.” To get to this conclusion, I argue that cryptography is unspeakable in the sense of being a written language without syllables (which perhaps disqualifies it as a language at all). Due to the curious nature of being unspeakable, cryptography shifts from mimetic to algorithmic representation. Algorithmic representation permits the transposition and combination of its symbolic elements, but only when made of disjoint, articulate, and unambiguous marks. This system of marks is a discrete notational scheme. Additionally, because algorithmic representation permits the rearrangement of its symbolic structure it can be used to order the world, in subtle but powerful ways. “Literature has nothing more to say,” remarks Friedrich Kittler, “because it all ends in cryptograms” (1999). This is only true if we take Kittler very literally, that literature has been silenced and can no longer speak. Kittler reminds us that speaking written words is not natural and immediate. First, the Greeks needed to “invent” vowels so as to create a storage system able to capture the wealth of articulable knowledge (Winthrop-Young, 2011). Second, in what Kittler (1990) called the Discourse Network 1800, the Mother’s Mouth must teach children how to speak these written marks. Kittler goes on to accuse those languages lacking written vowels as being unable to perfectly capture the world’s information. Written languages that lack vowels are not as expressive, Kittler problematically suggests, and so are not as mimetic (Winthrop-Young, 2011). Kittler remarks, “nobody knows how the heretic king Akhneten called his N-f-r-t-t when they were making children” (Kittler quoted in Winthrop-Young, 2011, p. 91). But, of course, this is a challenge for history, not the Egyptians. The Egyptians were able to speak the name that was recorded as N-f-r-t-t because they added the appropriate vowels, that is, they created syllables in speech. It is hard to underline this important point in the written form—I suggest you try speaking the letters, but out loud: N-f-r-t-t. The punchline is that in order to be voiced, syllables must be created, making sounds like “nef eff arr tee tee.” In the audio book version of E.A. Poe’s The Gold Bug (2013) this same comedy plays out when the poor narrator is forced to articulate a long series of cryptographic symbols, so that 5 3 ‡ ‡ † 3 0 in the text becomes “five, three, double dagger, double dagger, single dagger, three, zero” in the audio book (and to great comedic effect, this goes on for half a page). While the narrator demonstrated that it is possible to speak a cryptogram in some fashion, it no longer counts as speech in the sense of meaningful language. This is the lesson that the Mother’s Mouth must teach her children, separating the grunts of animals from those of human language (Kittler, 1990). The reason cryptography cannot be spoken is because it has very particular syntactic requirements. These requirements where formalized by Nelson Goodman (1976) in his analysis of notational schemes. Roughly, a notational scheme requires that marks can be interchanged within a class of marks without difference, and that one can in theory determine what character a particular mark belongs to. The result of this analysis is that a number of forms of writing, upon inspection, share a common ancestor. In addition to cryptography, notational schemes include musical notation, Morse code, and binary (e.g., compiled software code). Although Kittler’s accusations that consonantal written languages are less mimetic than their vowelized cousins is problematic, this lack becomes very real when writing transforms into a notational scheme. The smooth contours of the world are not well represented in a notational scheme. In Kittler’s media triptych, the gramophone and film camera are highly mimetic in that they record every gradient of nature, whereas the typewriter eradicates the “continuous movement of the hand” in handwriting (Benjamin quoted in Kittler, 1999, p. 196). The representation of likeness or verisimilitude is easy to imagine with a photograph, and yet even a typed, well-crafted story can also be very mimetic, as though the reader is transported into the scene. So the typewriter can, of course, be used to write a mimetic story, but it excels when it reduces the world to discrete symbols. Putting aside, for the moment, Kittler’s (1999) penchant for inaccurate but provocative history, it is a short historical step from typewriter to cryptogram, with the transformation of Nietzsche’s Malling typewriter into the German crypto-typewriter, the Enigma machine (Figure 3). Unlike the gramophone and film camera, recording N-f-r-t-t is no trouble for the typewriter. While the typewriter cannot capture voiced syllabification, it perfectly represents the alphabetization of language. And for the typewriter so too for cryptography: when encrypted, N-f-r-t-t readily becomes A-S-E-G-G. While notational schemes are poor at mimetic representation, the ease in which parts can be split and rearranged make them ideal for what I call “algorithmic” representation. Algorithmic technologies are powerful because they chop the world up in to discrete pieces and then re-arrange the results.xiii These technologies order the world rather than model or recreate it. To underline the point, all cryptography is just the simple substitution cipher, shuffling symbols about in determined, ordered ways. And the same principle is at work in all notational systems, where complex and surprising uses abound. Conceptualized in light of a notational scheme, cryptography surpasses the typical narrow conceptualization as secrecy. For example, Kittler’s barbarian Spartans invented a writing technology called the skytale. The skytale is a leather strap along which letters are written that, once wrapped around a wooden rod of a particular diameter, reveals a message. The device was once thought to facilitate a kind of primitive encryption, but recent research has shown it to be something else (Kelly, 1998; West, 1988).xiv How this technology was actually used is unknown, and somewhat beside the point: the skytale exemplified an early algorithmic machine, made of Kittler’s alphabet but impossible to phonetically speak. In fact, there is good evidence that the device may have been used to ensure silence, as a way of guarding against the accidental articulation of bad omens and the like (c.f. Lateiner, 2005; Montiglio, 2000). The skytaleis, perhaps, the first device to destroy syllabification, and to depart from mimetic media and move towards ordering language and the world. Another important aspect of cryptography is that it decomposes language into identical, modular pieces. This fact works equally well for other applications of the discrete notational scheme too. A thousand years after the Spartans, Alberti ushered in a new notational method for architecture that replaced the older craft-oriented way of building (Carpo, 2011). This notational system permitted architects to become designers, not makers, and enabled the construction of identical but modular buildings. So close is the connection between the notational schemes of architecture and cryptography, in fact, that Alberti generalized his architectural advancements and applied the same thinking to language to develop polyalphabetic cryptography (Alberti, 2010; Kahn, 1980). Similarly, Leibniz employed a notational scheme when he established the groundwork for discrete mathematics, and specifically, the mode of mathematics that we now use to analyze and model cryptography, known as combinatorics (what Leibniz called “complexions”). In Leibniz’s early work, Dissertation on the Art of Combinations (Dissertatio de arte combinatoria) (1989), he develops Raymund Lull’s cabalistic method of interrogating language and the natural world, setting it on firm mathematical and logical ground (Figure 4).xv To do so, Leibniz derives his metaphysical analysis of order from the existence of natural parts and wholes (or “unities”). Leibniz writes, “let the whole be ABC; then AB, BC, and AC will be smaller wholes,” which “by reason of order” results in “abcd, bcda, cbab, dabc” (calculated to be “arranged in 24 ways”) (Leibniz, 1989, p. 78). Leibniz’s development of order ultimately leads to modern symbolic logic, and by way of Stanhope, Jevons, and others to the calculating machine (Gardner, 1958). Eventually, it can be surmised, Turing’s machine would read a tape of Leibniz’s letters and re-order the input, perhaps (after von Neumann) according to a particular programmed algorithm. Although Shannon recognized the importance of discrete symbol processing (as noted above), it was Turing that really advanced this position by seeing the potential in ordering discrete symbols (Figure 5). The link from Alberti to Turing arrives by way of representational machines that employ a discrete notational scheme. When this representation is set in motion, the complex ordering is not limited to language. Cryptography has long been used to investigate the natural world or create art, and is now poised to order the economy. Before showing how Bitcoin orders the economy we must understand how cryptography functions in Bitcoin. The cryptography used in Bitcoin is not unusual or exemplary; in fact, there are no cryptographic innovations in Bitcoin (in computer security terms, this is a virtue of the system). Bitcoin uses a standard SHA-256 hashing algorithm. This hashing algorithm is put to some seemingly strange uses, but nothing unique to the history of cryptography since the development of public key cryptography in the 1970s. For the vast majority of the history of cryptography—its development from substitution ciphers and code systems to polyalphabetic and keyed algorithms—the encrypting mechanism was unitary. With the invention of public (or asymmetric) key cryptography in the 1970s it became possible to create a system that “split” the cryptographic key.xvi Splitting the cryptographic key (explained below) ushered in new uses for cryptography, and was well timed for the coming advance of the Internet and popularization of point-to-point electronic communication. In simple “code” systems (often called “nomenclators”) a letter, word, or entire phrase may be replaced with an alternative, with the substitution presumably kept private between the two communicating parties (Kahn, 1967). The basic principle is captured by so-called substitution ciphers, which exchange one letter for another in a deterministic manner. From this mechanism more complicated forms of cryptography were invented. Polyalphabetic cryptography uses multiple alphabets for the substitution, sometimes jumping from one alphabet to another according to an agreed-upon secret “key.” For much of the history of cryptography no notion of cryptographic “key” existed. In more recent usage the key became analytically separated from the cryptographic algorithm, as a result of “industrial” uses of cryptography that require reusable ciphers. We now generally speak of an immutable (public) algorithm, and a mutable (private) key. In fact, the key is no more important than the set of transformations (and should be characterized as part of the system of transformation). For purposes of cryptanalysis (“codebreaking”) a key is only as valuable as knowledge of the corresponding mechanism or set of transformations. Yet, in recent years cryptographic best practice requires keeping the key secret and the mechanism public (working on the assumption that the mechanism will eventually be discovered and reverse-engineered anyway). Symmetric-key cryptography employs the same key for encryption and decryption, so the shared secret item is identical among parties. The obvious downside is that to maintain secret communications all parties must ensure that the shared key is kept private from any so-called adversaries. Modern forms of symmetric-key cryptography work on digital bits, either encrypting the bits one at a time (or, more realistically, encrypting byte by byte or in prescribed bit-length “words”), or grouping the bits into blocks (and adding padding as needed so that each block includes the same number of bits). Other non-cryptographic features may be present in a modern cryptographic system, such as error detection, compression, and so on. The symbolic transformations in symmetric-key cryptography are fundamentally the same as that of asymmetric-key cryptography—in fact, symmetric-key primitives can be used to build asymmetric-key systems. The sole (but critically important) difference between symmetric-key and asymmetric-key cryptography is that rather than sharing a single (unitary) secret key, asymmetric-key). This paper showed how the traditional (secrecy) conceptualization of cryptography is wanting; in its place, I argued for a new conceptualization as a notational system. As Leibniz and Turing understood, a notational system can order the world in powerful ways. Reading the politics of Bitcoin in light of a reimagination of Deleuze’s control society (replacing modulation with order) I suggested that cryptography is a powerful “new weapon,” functioning as an ordering machine. I argued that Bitcoin is at the forefront of advancing this ordering logic, updating the economic system for our new control society. Quinn DuPont quinn.dupont@utoronto.ca Faculty of Information, University of Toronto i Mt. Gox was the most popular bitcoin exchange, and dealt primarily in USD, although many other exchanges are available (some with regional or jurisdictional foci). Mt. Gox started as a trading card exchange for the online game Magic: The Gathering Online, but eventually rebranded to focus exclusively on bitcoin. ii This was the first spike in value for 2013; the second (much larger) spike occurred a few months later when bitcoins were trading above 1000 USD/bitcoin, often swinging more than 50% in value in a matter of hours. iii The recent revelations of US military contractor Edward Snowden perpetuate this ideology, even if they eroded the universal trust in cryptography. For many, the response was simply a need for better cryptography, seemingly safe from the revealed fact that US Intelligence services can readily crack or circumvent available cryptography. iv The Electronic Frontier Foundation advocates the widespread use of cryptography (Opsahl et al., 2013); see below for evidence of bitcoin’s origins on the Cypherpunks mailing list. v See for example Rosenheim (1997) and Shoptaw (2000) on literature and poetics, Ellison (2011, 2008) on textual studies, Gleick (2011) on information, Pesic (2000a, 2000b, 1997) on science, Blanchette (2012) on documentation, Eco (1986) on semiotics, and Zielinski (2008) on media. vi See the journal of record, Cryptologia, for the history of cryptography. While many of the articles published in Cryptologia are the only source of history and should be applauded for their trailblazing work, most are published by hobbyists or experts in engineering who have an interest in historical matters. Even Kahn himself, who over the years has become a highly capable self-trained historian, started as a journalist. These histories, correspondingly, usually suffer from the evils of bad historiographical methodology: “impact” accounts of technical change, over-reporting of military technologies, and whiggish, teleologically-driven narratives. vii Although written prior to his famous Essay, Mercury was published posthumously. viii For an assessment of universal and philosophical language schemes, with occasional reference to the role of cryptography, see (Cohen, 1954; Formigari, 2004, 1993, 1988; Maat, 2004; Rossi, 2000; Salmon, 1971, 1966; Slaughter, 1982; Wilding, 2001). ix Note that Glidden (1987) argues that the French version (here pictured) of Trithemius’ Polygraphiae contains a slightly artificial “reinforced” link to Lullian and cabalistic influences. x Cryptography is often twinned with war. At times these associations can be productive (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Kittler, 1999), but far too often they constrain our thinking, leading to discourse (and associated models) of “adversaries,” “man-in-the-middle,” “attack” and so on. The bellicose nature of cryptography cannot be dismissed—it is a war machine—but I think we should derive, not assume, such connections. xi Although only occasionally recognized, the histories of information and cryptography are intimately tied (see e.g., Gleick, 2011). xii “Discrete” and “discreet” share the Latin origin discretus. xiii For a more extensive description of the dialectic of mimetic and algorithmic technologies see Takhteyev and DuPont (n.d.). xiv The skytale has been disqualified as cryptography simply because it doesn’t offer plausibly good secrecy. As I have been trying to argue, we need to think more expansively about our conceptualization of cryptography, and may want to return to the original understanding of the skytale as an encryption device, but one that offers something other than secrecy. xv It is worth noting that Alberti’s cryptographic work was also influenced by Lull (Kahn, 1980). xvi Asymmetric-key cryptography was initially invented in 1973 at the Government Communication Headquarters in the UK by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcom Williamson but kept secret; it was then publically re-invented in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman (Levy, 2002). xvii More complicated three-pass schemes are possible too, in which I encrypt a message and pass it to you, then you encrypt the already-encrypted message and pass it back, I then decrypt my encryption and pass it back to you, at which point you can finally decrypt your encryption and read the message—successfully transferred in public while remaining encrypted. xviii At this point the anarchist/libertarian undercurrents are completely at the fore, Dai (1998) starts his proposal, “I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy.” xix Of course, this is the ideal scenario. Any competing network of greater computational power could best the legitimate one, and therefore human vagaries of collusion and consolidation come to play. This has actually happened, when due to a technical bug the blockchain became “forked,” and was only reset when a cartel of powerful mining pools colluded to switch to the “corrected” blockchain. Alberti, G. B. (2010). De componendis cifris. In K. Williams, L. March, & S. R. Wassell (Eds.), The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti (pp. 169–187). Basel: Springer Basel. Retrieved from 007%2F978-3-0346-0474-1_4 Aspray, W. F. (1985). The Scientific Conceptualization of Information: A Survey. Annals of the History of Computing, 7(2), 117–140. Back, A. (1997, March 28). hash cash postage implementation. Cypherpunks. Retrieved from http://www.hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt Bacon, F. (1762). Novum organum scientiarum. Venetiis: Typis G. Girardi. Bauer, F. L. (2005). Cryptology. In Encyclopedia of cryptography and security. 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(1561). Polygraphie: Universelle escriture Cabalistique de M.I. Tritheme Abbé. Paris: Jaques Keruer. Retrieved from http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/bookrecord.php?record=F034 Turing, A. (c. 1939-42). Turing’s Notes on the Enigma Machine (Catalogue reference: HW 25/3). Retrieved from http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/spies/ciphers/enigma/en1.htm West, S. (1988). Archilochus’ Message-Stick. The Classical Quarterly, 38(1), 42–48. Wilding, N. (2001). “If You Have A Secret, Either Keep It, Or Reveal It”: Cryptography and Universal Language. In D. Stolzenberg (Ed.), The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (pp. 93–103). Firenze, Italia: CADMO. Wilkins, J. (1668). Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. London: Royal Society. Wilkins, J. (1694). Mercury: or, The secret and swift messenger. Shewing, how a man may with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at any distance. London: R. Baldwin. Winthrop-Young, G. (2011). Kittler and the Media. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press. Zielinski, S. (2008). Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (G. Custance, Trans.). The MIT Press. You must be logged in to post a comment. Joining Humanity+ as a Full, Plus or Sponsor Member enables you to participate in Humanity+ governance and decision-making - an important role in the growing Transhumanist movement. It also, of course, gives you the opportunity to support us in the work Humanity+ does! cryptography uses a binary key, in which the two parts are linked and both are required to decrypt and encrypt. By splitting the key into two linked parts, one part can be kept secret, while the other is made public (the parts are typically linked mathematically—e.g., prime factorization or calculating the discrete logarithm—but any suitable mechanism could be used). The private key should not be easily deducible from the public key, yet the public key should be easily deducible from the private key (using so-called mathematical trap-door functions). A trap-door function such as exponentiation modulo is based on the mathematical belief that it is easy to calculate the remainder when a number is raised to some power, divided by another (the modulus), yet, if given all the information other than the exponent, it is very difficult to solve for the exponent (i.e., it is slow to compute the discrete logarithm). Only when the secret key is possessed is it easy to open the trap door, otherwise the calculation is slow (but certainly tractable). Asymmetric-key setups offer several interesting possibilities. The key used to encrypt a message is not the same key used to decrypt it, so I may encrypt a message with your public key, in which only you can decrypt (using your linked private key). Configured this way, I can send you a message that only you can read (akin to placing a piece of mail in a publicly-accessible but locked mailbox), and you can do the same for me by using my public key, ensuring confidentiality.xvii Similarly, if I encrypt a message with my private key and send you both my (cleartext) message and the encrypted message (or a “digest” of it), your ability to decrypt the encrypted message with my public key ensures that the message is authentic (non-repudiated, i.e., guaranteed to be mine). These features work to permit secret message communication without ever requiring a secret communication channel, or to ensure that a message has not been changed. In a world where the communication channel is necessarily open to eavesdropping, asymmetrical-key cryptography performs a kind of magic trick: secret messages over public channels without ever requiring the prior transmission of secret information. A related application of asymmetric-key cryptography is the hash function. A hash function is a set of permutations that transform some data into a fixed-sized output (a digest), which changes considerably given even a slightly different input datum. When a hash function uses cryptographic mechanisms to create the digest it can be used to ensure the message is not repudiated (its integrity can be verified), which is especially useful for creating compact, easily transmittable “fingerprints” of data. Similarly, by computing a hash for a password, the hash may be stored in place of the secret password, and authenticated against the digest representation instead of the actual password (allowing the digest to be captured by an adversary without losing secrecy). The hash algorithm used in Bitcoin is SHA-256, a protocol for hashing in the Secure Hash Algorithm 2 family that outputs 256 bit digests. SHA-256 is composed of a simple set of logic transformations configured to perform the necessary mathematical trap-door function required by the asymmetric-key cryptography. Thus, described in as many of levels of abstraction as I can muster, from the basics of digital computation to a full ASCII-encoded hash digest, the SHA-256 hash algorithm operates as follows. Electromagnetic flux is discretized on a clock-cycle. Bits are then transformed using logical operations performed by transistors. The binary representation is collected into 64 bit “words” that function as high-level data structures (integers). Mathematical trap-door/one-way functions are constructed from the set of transformations (+, and, or, xor, shr, rot), with the entire algorithmic structure corresponding to the Merkle–Damgård padding and compression scheme (Figure 6). The resulting 256-bit hash digest may then be encoded into an ASCII-encoded character string for portability and human-readability. In sum, SHA-256 is the process of successively interpreting electric-magnetic flux as a series of different ordering mechanisms or techniques. The primary ordering is the first: from flux to binary, and once this discretization is accepted as real (by fiat) the ordering techniques are limited only by human imagination. The fundamental cryptographic algorithm used in Bitcoin is SHA-256, however, its conceptual utility draws on a recent history of academic and practical developments. Of the numerous developments, the most significant and relevant are: Ralph Merkle’s hash-trees (patent filed in 1979), David Chaum’s blind signatures (1982), Adam Back’s hashcash proof of work system (1997), Wei Dai’s b-money scheme (1998), Nick Szabo’s bit gold concept (1999), and Hal Finney’s reusable proofs of work (2004). In addition to having a hand in the invention of public key cryptography, Ralph Merkle developed a system for efficiently verifying large data structures through a tree structure of hash digests (Merkle, 1982). As described above, a hash digest can be used to verify the non-reputability of a datum, but for large data structures it would be extremely time-consuming to perform a hash function on every datum. Merkle realized that by organizing hash digests into a tree structure (where each node is a hash digest) it is possible to compute the hash digest for only the top-most node (while authenticating the left and right nodes) rather than every node, to ensure non-reputability. Hash trees are commonly used to ensure data integrity, but when used with cryptographic hash functions every prior message is checked for authenticity (none of the messages can be faked). Blind signatures are another result of public key cryptography being used in unexpected ways. In Chaum’s original concept for blinded signatures, payment systems with the anonymity of cash but the security of digital money (like Bitcoin) were the intended target (Chaum, 1982). By using public key cryptography Chaum proposed a system that ensured 1) the inability of third parties to determine information about the payee, 2) the ability of individuals to provide proof of payment, and 3) the ability to stop payments when needed (in cases of theft). Chaum envisioned a digital equivalent of paper envelopes lined with carbon paper. By writing a signature on the outside of the envelope a second “blind” signature is duplicated on the inside. In Chaum’s example of authenticated secret voting, the blinded signature is sent to the elector, removed from the envelope, signed by the elector, and mailed back to the voter in a new envelope (thus only the elector views the signature). If a voting dispute arises the signatures can be authenticated against the signatures on the envelopes, but each vote remains anonymous. While the mutability of binary digits is useful for much computing, a system of electronic cash requires the opposite quality: money needs to be made solid, slow, and non-(token)replicable. Originally proposed and developed by Adam Back (1997) for limiting email spam, hashcash uses two facts of public key cryptography: non-reputability of hash digests, and the computational difficulty of finding a hash “collision.” Due to the fact that it is nearly impossible to predict the outcome of a hash function on an arbitrary input (with current knowledge of the mathematical underpinnings of asymmetric-key cryptography used in hash functions), but easy to verify the results, a challenge-response mechanism can be created to require “work” (computational effort). By arbitrarily requiring a specified output of a hash function—such as that the first 20 or more bits of the hash digest must be zeros—the sender can establish a “difficulty” threshold. The only way to find a hash digest with a specified output is to compute the hash of a different input value over and over until the result meets the necessary difficulty, and since the result can be verified easily the receiver of the hash function does not need to repeat the computational work to verify that the sender expended a set amount of work. For its original purpose of limiting email spam, the requirement to perform work when sending email would make sending email slow and computationally expensive, thus, sending a single email would result in a modest slow-down, but sending millions would become nearly impossible (or at least would require many expensive computers). In such an email system any email that was sent without corresponding evidence of computational work would not pass verification by the receiver (which is a quick calculation, in comparison to performing the original hash calculation), and would be discarded as spam. As part of the discussion of applications to Back’s hashcash proposal on the Cypherpunks mailing list, Wei Dai proposed a system of currency generation using Back’s mechanism (Dai, 1998).xviii Dai applies Back’s hashcash mechanism in an effort to create a world where cryptography functions as the “medium of exchange,” and as a way to “enforce contracts” without the intervention of a government (Dai, 1998). Dai’s protocol for the creation of bmoney requires a specified amount of computational work (that anyone can perform), which is then verified by the community who update a collective ledger book, awarding the worker the specified funds. In the bmoney proposal, exchange of funds is accomplished by collective bookkeeping (authenticated with cryptographic hashes), and contracts are enforced through the broadcast and signing of transactions with digital signatures (i.e., public key cryptography). Hal Finney (2004) extended the bmoney and hashcash proposals by suggesting a formalization of the proof of work mechanism, a scheme that permits the reuse and exchange of proof of work tokens (hash digests). With these extensions it became possible for Nick Szabo (Szabo, 2008, 1997) to conceive a system that accurately calculates the “difficulty” of proof of work for the purpose of money generation, and to allow the generated money (hash digests) to be exchanged and reused. When the pseudonymous programmer Satoshi Nakamoto proposed Bitcoin in 2008 it built on the crypto-anarchist developments from the following two decades (Nakamoto, 2008). In terms of invention, Bitcoin introduced a modest change to the bmoney, bit money (and other) proposals already in existence. Rather than require a single collective ledger of transactions, or awkwardly share the ledger among parties, Nakamoto suggested that a “blockchain” contain all transactions (including generated money by “miners” performing cryptographic proofs of work, described in more detail below). The blockchain is a Merkle hash tree of transactions. For each transaction the mining servers verify the hash digests that result from transactions, incentivised to perform computational work by being awarded money for successfully performing proofs of work. The transactions are verified by the miners and grouped into “blocks”; once the top node of each block is verified a specified amount of work is required to seal the block and win the resulting money. A full round of a transaction requires several steps. Money is stored in a wallet, which is a unique hash digest generated by each user (and any number of wallets are possible). To send you money I first digitally sign the transaction request with my private key (that is, I perform asymmetric-key encryption on the transaction request data). Using my public key, the network can verify my transaction request. The transaction request is sent (via peer-to-peer communication protocols) to the network and then bundled with others into blocks every ten minutes. Each block includes a hash digest of the previous blocks (arranged in a hash tree), a hash digest of the current block, and a “nonce”. A nonce is added input that (when hashed) results in a radically different output. Only when an output value meets a certainly “difficulty” (proof of work) will a block be considered authenticated (the difficulty is specified by requiring at least n leading zeros in the hash digest output, set by the protocol to regulate the speed of block generation). As each subsequent block is verified the previous blocks fall further down the hash-tree, with the newer hashes contingent on the previous hash digests’ value. In this way any fraudulent changes to the blockchain are instantly discovered (and rejected). It is improbable to create fraudulent transactions because as time goes on, and block upon block is verified by the miners, fraudulent transactions would require changing every subsequent block, at a rate greater than the (legitimate) network of miners. A fraudulent block would only be accepted if the alternative blockchain is longer, which would require performing more proofs of work than the legitimate network.xix In many ways the Bitcoin miner is at the heart of Bitcoin cryptography, since it creates money and verifies transactions. Starting in 2013, I engaged in the practical operation of a Bitcoin miner. What follows is a description of this Bitcoin praxis as I learned the details of the protocol. As described above, the Bitcoin algorithm uses the SHA-256 method of computing hash digests. While any computing mechanism could in theory calculate a SHA-256 hash, there are certain reasons why conventional Central Processing Unit (CPU) mining is now rarely used. With even the fastest modern CPUs running software designed to take advantage of multithreaded computation the number of hashes computed per second is low compared to other technologies, and because the ability to “win” the awarded money for a successfully verified block is in competition with other miners, an arms race is always at hand. CPUs are usually designed to manage and switch computational tasks, and take care of a variety of sub-processes, which makes a CPU ideal for general computing but inefficient for performing the same type of simple calculation repeatedly. Commercially available Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are designed to be relatively free from the management of resources and thus (when appropriately programmed using low-level software) are able to perform repeated calculations much faster than CPUs. Additionally, GPUs are designed to work in parallel, so while a multi-core, multithreaded CPU may be able to perform a certain amount of work in parallel, a modern GPU can perform thousands of computations in parallel. Some GPUs are ideally suited to perform SHA-256 calculations because they have been designed to perform XOR logic in a single step, rather than the two steps (or cycles) needed for other devices (the SHA-256 algorithm relies extensively on XOR transformations). For real-world comparison, on a slightly aging (2008) Mac Pro computer I was able to perform roughly 30 Kh/s (kilo hashes per second, or thousands of hashes per second) using the CPU (a server-grade 3GHz quad core Intel Xeon processor). When I installed a modern mid-level gaming video card (AMD Radeon HD 5850) with a dedicated GPU the same machine was able to perform roughly 350 Mh/s (millions of hashes per second), using only the GPU for calculating the hashes. While 350 Mh/s may seem like considerable computational power—and it is, especially for the corollary purpose of password cracking—newer technologies have all but obsoleted GPU Bitcoin mining. For the last several years more dedicated Bitcoin mining individuals have purchased Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices that are tailored to perform these sorts of computational tasks, doing so much more quickly and with less power consumption. By the end of 2012 the newest type of Bitcoin mining device entered the commercial market, eclipsing even FPGA devices in terms of speed and power efficiency. These Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) devices are custom-designed for Bitcoin mining and thus do so with remarkable speed and power efficiency. As of 2013 there are commercially available Bitcoin miners available for $150 USD that perform 5 Gh/s (billions of hashes per second) and use only 30 watts of power (compared to an average video card’s consumption of 100-150 watts), with more expensive versions performing hundreds or even thousands of Gh/s. Efficient Bitcoin mining is only possible using specially built software, tailored to take advantage of built-in hardware capabilities. On GPUs the programming language used to write the portion of software that performs the hash calculations is typically Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) or Open Compute Language (OpenCL), whereas the high-level software that controls the input/output, networking, and display of graphical user interfaces can be written in any suitable programming language. Contemporary cryptography algorithms are highly repetitive, requiring round after round of simple logic transformations, just like digital signal processing, big data and science computing, and gaming (computing millions of polygons). For this reason, cryptography shares many of the technological advances with these computing fields. As demonstrated above, a more expansive view of cryptography suggests that cryptography can be used for more than just secrecy; it can be fruitfully understood as a notational system. When this notational system is operationalized it orders its symbolic input according to particular logics. When these ordered symbols represent the world, as in the case of economic transactions, a politics of ordering is present. That the economy is a “slave to the algorithm” (Slater, 2013) is not due to Bitcoin; dominant capital is now almost exclusively run through digital trading software (acknowledged as “high-frequency trading”), and much of the developed world’s “cash” passes digitally direct from bank to merchant (to bank) through debit or credit machines at point-of-sale terminals. Cash money already seems quaint: the stuff of slightly unscrupulous transactions (a manual trade exchanged for tax-free cash payment), or downright illegal transactions (purchasing drugs). The politics of this “new” economy can be read in light of Gilles Deleuze’s short “Postscript on the societies of control” (1992). Deleuze summarizes Foucault’s (1979) periodization of history by reflecting on the “transience of the model,” noting that the sovereign society was replaced by a disciplinary one—a transition occurring roughly at the dawn of the eighteenth century. According to Deleuze, the next shift occurs at the outset of the twentieth century, towards a control society (Deleuze, 1992). Deleuze charges his readers not to “fear or hope [for]” these mechanisms but instead to “look for new weapons” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4). I argue that cryptography is one such new weapon in the control society: controlling economics through the ordering application of Bitcoin. Deleuze argues that the control society is characterized by modulation, rather than the “molds, distinct castings” of the prior disciplinary society (Deleuze, 1992). In the English translation “modulation” evokes the Latin modus, meaning measurement, accomplished by numbers (“numerical”). Similarly, each society is characterized by a kind of language: the disciplinary society is analogical and the control society is numerical. Yet, Foucault spends considerable effort in Order of Things (2002) showing how measurement and number are still foundational to the logic of the classical era, summed up in the term “order.” While it is commonly believed that cryptography is mathematical (mathematicians, after all, are the gatekeepers of contemporary cryptography), above I showed how mathematics is but one of many ways to enact a deeper ordering. The notational system—discrete marks capable of being rearranged—is, I argue, the heart of cryptography. Numeracy is an after-effect of the deeper logic that Leibniz, Turing, and others recognized—and proven daily by capable software developers with almost no mathematical skill. So long as you can represent objects within a notational system, the world can be ordered with no mathematics at all. Yet, Deleuze thinks that the mechanism of the control society is modulation or measurement, and Kittler too thinks that by counting the Greek alphabet we arrive at all the mathematical truths of the world (Winthrop-Young, 2011). It is exactly the infinite variability of measurement that cannot be ordered, since there is always a more precise measurement possible (Goodman’s formalization explicitly rules out continuous measurement). Kittler’s gramophone records the smooth contours of a voice perfectly, but the result is not susceptible to decomposition, and therefore cannot be ordered. It is only by ignoring the measurements (continuous waves) that ordering technologies are able to function. When we discretize the voice we perform violence, and we lose the knowledge of what king Akhneten called his N-f-r-t-t. For Bitcoin, the smooth transfer of cash (previously “filthy lucre”) from hand-to-hand is replaced with an algorithmic logic. In our society, the largely invisible but very powerful effects of control often result from ordering technologies. Algorithmic technologies are able to sort, move, and re-arrange entire populations in ways that mimetic technologies are unable to accomplish. The Hollerith tabulator, an early proto-computer, was effective in aiding the Nazi extermination of Jews (Luebeke and Milton, 1994) because it could collect, process, and order entire populations in ways that mimetic technologies such as radio or television were incapable of. Cryptography now functions infrastructurally, and sits invisibly behind most of the world’s communications (machinic “data” transmissions such as encrypted Netflix TV streams or Trusted Computing modules, but also human correspondences such as email communications). As Bitcoin and other electronic crypto-cash systems become prevalent, cryptographic ordering will become more entrenched in the economic realm (it already functions invisibly at electronic point-of-sale machines, automated bank tellers, financial trading, and so on). For Bitcoin, the specific ordering is the logic of SHA-256 described above: discrete symbols arranged through a collection of logical transformations, built block by block of irreversible containers with strong identity parameters (necessarily discrete and disjoint). The hash digests are then organized into a tree structure. Finally, the hash tree is sent through peer-to-peer networks, succumbing to a logic of collusion and virality. Cryptography is “code,” and code is cryptography. Code is powerful because it represents, that is, it both “re-presents” or makes something present again, and “stands for” or “substitutes” (Prendergast, 2000). Code worries us for the reasons that Rousseau rallied against political representation, fearing a dictatorial relationship where we permit others to “stand in” for us (2003).  Similarly, Heidegger calls representation the master category of modern thought because it forces the division of subject and object (Heidegger, 2002; Prendergast, 2000). More concretely, our cryptographic technologies are at once Privacy Enhancing Technologies and also weapons in the commonplace cyberwars amongst developed nations. Even prosaic questions become ambiguous. Does Google increase my privacy by encrypting my Gmail communications, now open to only the machinic display of advertising? Am I better off by having a cryptographically secure boot sequence for my computer (and thus preventing the installation of “competitor” operating systems, like Linux)? Is it a “feature” that Bitcoin transactions are cryptographically irreversible? In this new control society there is no second-guessing your economic decisions, and no need to involve messy legal and political authorities, since code has become law in frighteningly efficient ways (Lessig, 2006