Ari Paul

2/ Sorry! I misidentified Chris as CEO but he's former CEO.

In case the math is unclear - to find the CEO's total economic XRP holdings, add up both his direct holdings, and his indirect holdings via his ownership in the Ripple company.

2/ A few people have helpfully pointed out that crypto hasn't sold off on Jan 1 in any recent years, and *has* sold off in early to mid Jan. So....maybe we shouldn't read too much into Jan 1 and Jan 2 effects.

Thanks to @haydentiff and @nbougalis for engaging with me, I seriously mean that. I like them both. I don't know either well, but from my interactions, both are smart and well-intentioned. We can debate and learn and educate. Goodnight cryptoverse.

5/ This isn't good or bad. Centralized control has value and allows for faster development and a big marketing budget. We just want to be honest about the code + people and what that means. Any statement about XRP's future is a statement about the Ripple company as well.

4/ I can't *know* the incentives of either the futures BTC community or the future XRP community, but I can say that when one entity has majority economic control, as well as leads the development and trusted node operation, it has a good deal of control over the future.

3/ These kinds of hypotheticals are critical in understanding cryptocurrency, since cryptocurrency = code + people. The code is open source, so it alone has no value. The value relies on game theory which relies on knowing who the players are and their incentives.

2/ And XRP's stated use case requires catering to banks. If banks signal that they will readily adopt XRP and bid the network up to $1 trillion if XRP was made freezeable, might the Ripple company and some community members support a hard fork to make it happen?

1/ All cryptocurrency protocols can be changed with varying difficulty. BTC *currently* has a 1 MB limit. Will it always? We don't know. BTC is decentralized and very difficult to hard fork. XRP is majority owned and operated by one company, so much easier to hard fork it.https://twitter.com/haydentiff/status/948019430960914432 …

There were a lot of potential bearish effects today. Tax selling (to put off realized gains by 12 months), low liquidity, reversal if fund managers ran things up year end. Market survived them all. Follow through tomorrow probably sets the tone for January.

3/ but there’s no substitute for hard work. You’re not gonna change the world in 50 hours a week. It takes 50 hours just to stay up to date. Work on the most important high level aspects of what you do, but work your ass off.

2/ be lazy in that you need to automate or delegate all menial and repetitive tasks, even relatively “high level”, like simple coding. If something is boring, find a way to get it done without you doing it.

1/ Life advice for the ambitious: be simultaneously the laziest and hardest working person you know.

Privacy is literally a matter of life or death for political dissidents around the world.https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/947878557702852608 …

10/ I have no problem with centralized and semi-centralized cryptocurrencies. They can serve a function. I just think it's important that people understand the strengths and limitations of what they're buying. Centralization is a spectrum.

9/ So ethereum's consensus rule changes will almost certainly have buy-in from a meaningful % of the community beyond the ethereum foundation. I can't say the same about XRP's, one way or the other.

8/ So I say "currently." I say "currently" for Ethereum consensus rules as well. Ethereum's consensus rules will almost certainly change in the future, but ethereum is far less centralized in ownership, development, and node operation.

7/ I have no idea what the Ripple company will try to do. I am *not* saying they will try to making anything else freezable. But the point is that we can't say what will be freezeable in the future if one entity has a good chance of being able to change the rules.

6/ In contrast, more than half of all XRP tokens are owned by one company, and the majority of trusted nodes are run by that same company. This means that if today the Ripple company wanted to hard fork the XRP consensus code, they would at least have a decent shot.