Ripple XRP: the Battle Over Scale !!

[00:00:00]There's a battle today on X, regarding XRP Ledger and the reserve account fees.

[00:00:05]And at first glance, it's like, "What's the big deal here? Whether it's 1 XRP or 10 XRP, who really cares?" But you'll see, this is a big issue as we start to scale this network, as we move to 10 or 100 million users or billions of users, you know, how we get to scale, uh, this kind of little stuff can make a big difference. More importantly is this though, with the XRP Ledger, it all happens in the open, these discussions.

[00:00:30]Sometimes it's David or some Ripple executives or some independent developers and everyday people like yourself and and me. We can go on there and take part in these discussions. When you look at other ecosystems, it's not like that. I will show you over here to Adam Back, a Bitcoin Core. He just says stuff like, "Well, you just don't understand what's happening, so you don't get to take part in this discussion." Or here, where it's quite humorous, but he's calling everyone a bunch of plubs. We're going to just sweep the plubs aside and do kind of what we want to do anyway, cuz we know best. That's not a decentralized network. That's not how the game works, right? There's a lot of different stakeholders and everyone gets to participate and it happens in the open on the XRP Ledger. And that's what's happening here with this debate. And again, it seems small at first, but it is not. It is a very real discussion here. I wrote this article today on XRP on uh, junglelinkxrp.com.

[00:01:23]And it's the XRP Ledger reserve debate is really about who pays for mass adoption and how we get there, really.

[00:01:31]This is what kicks it off. We have Daniel, the self-proclaimed uh, CEO of XRP, right? He says, "We need to reserve fee to be a tenth of an XRP right now." He says, "The current base reserve sits at 1 XRP. That's a real barrier when you're trying to onboard real users or spin up accounts at scale." Now, a lot of people say, "Look, it's about a buck. What's the big deal?"

[00:01:53]But remember, it's a buck for every asset that you want to hold on your digital wallet. If you end up being a stock investor and this is the back end, if you have 50 various uh investments, you're going to lock up 50 XRP, right?

[00:02:08]That's no small amount, especially as we think about what David said, that where this technology really scales is people in in areas that are underserved or unbanked and they don't have regular investment options like you or me may take for granted here where they can get get just reasonable investments, ETFs, S&P 500. They just want, you know, normal financial products. So, someone like that, you know, if they're going to lock up $50 for nothing essentially, it could be uh a barrier to entry here. Um we have other things what Da- Daniel's talking about as as a business, as he's trying to bring on regular people to use this as the back end, uh it does become problematic, but it's not for no reason and that's important part and this is what makes it tricky. Vet with a great post here. Vet says, "Heated debate on XRP ledger reserve today. I'm not voting to lower those reserves." He recaps, "Where did we start? Well, 2012, activating an account required 1,000 XRP just to activate your account." Um you know, we we have brought these fees down over time as XRP has increased in value to make it more reasonable. And this is the important part. He says, "The architects designed reserves as a deliberate protection mechanism of network resources, storage, and memory against spam and DDoS attacks. Storage and memory are expensive." So, this is the problem.

[00:03:34]If you let people just add accounts, you know, it will like what happens if you go out and you add a million accounts?

[00:03:41]Someone's got to pay to store all that data, right? And so, it could swell out of control really fast. This could be problematic and so that's what Vet's looking like like especially with the cost of memory uh and the cost of compute right now, uh if this gets out of hand, it could be problematic. Uh we're not going to bring it down. And then he goes on to say the following. He says, "For people who uh enter XRPL and have less than 20 cents, it's friction.

[00:04:09]Uh for this, we are completely ignoring why reserves exist." So, I think both him and Daniel make some really good points and both kind of talk over each other to a great de- degree.

[00:04:18]Uh Daniel goes on to say, "My issue isn't converting an XRP ledger user.

[00:04:23]Uh it's a customer. It's onboarding and converting a normie. So, let's say you're going to take 100,000 customers as a business and you want them to use your app using XRP ledger on the back end, right? Making it the most efficient payment service uh on planet Earth.

[00:04:39]Well, if you're a small company, you're going to have to front-load $100,000 just in reserve fees, not not to count everything else. So, it is a barrier to entry for businesses and also in emerging markets, I think to ignore that is a problem as well cuz that's what everyone's trying to capture, the unbanked, uh you know, all of those underserved people cuz they need something and they have nothing now, so it's wide open. Uh Daniel's going on to say, "I'm not trying to onboard the crypto person who's already set up. I want to onboard someone who has no clue at what I'm telling them beyond download this wallet, click this link, and done. When you have to tell them, 'Oh yeah, by the way, also, uh you know, you got to lock up this XRP and and you can get some of it back, you know, it starts to get complicated, right? He wants to reduce the frictions to onboard real people. And so, who's right here at the end of the day? Is Vet right? Is Daniel right? Well, they both are. And there is a sweet spot where we protect the network and also we make it easy for people like Daniel to take the normies and bring them on the blockchain. Is 1 XRP the right number?

[00:05:44]Well, for me personally, I'm going to get annoyed if I have enough issued assets and I have enough XRP and as XRP starts to rise and want that back, right? So, to me one XRP seemed a little rich. I I think we can lower that down to a more reasonable number and scale and still protect against you know, spam and nonsense and you know, people aren't going to just add accounts and well, I mean, have a little bit of a cost there, but I think one XRP is a little bit too high.

[00:06:14]This is the great thing. You can go on X, you can talk to Daniel then. I'm sure at some point David will get in here on this and you know, various people over there at Ripple and and this is really decided by the validators, right? They they set that. This isn't by amendments.

[00:06:29]They all set what they think the reserve should be and and that's how we decide that. So, again, the little things, they make a big difference. You have to make sure you get them right and that will help you both scale and protect the network.

[00:06:41]Let me know what you think down below.

[00:06:43]As always, please like, please subscribe. The revolution will be televised right here on Jungle Link.