Let's see with ripple... being centralized the 2 owners can create as much more ripple as they want as it is not mined. They can also freeze or reverse any transaction they want, and have done so in the past. Also remember you have to burn ripple in a transaction which is getting pretty costly by now, if anyone did any transactions they'd notice. As the owners can create as much more ripple as they want it won't matter to them. Also see the chart history of ripple, pump&dump central. (Pun intended )
XLM founder is formerly from Mt. Gox after an argument he left Ripple and created his own fork ... it's essentially the same coin with just enough code change to fork soooo... well... you can draw your own conclusions there.
It's an open market and everyone can send their money where they want, and those are highly profitable right now.
Well here's the thing - XRP is meaningless, especially as a currency. The Ripple Network is what banks are looking into, and I think the tokens are merely tools to actually write the real-world money transactions into the network. The value of the token is meaningless for the network - banks aren't paying the price for massive amounts of tokens, the tokens are merely being passed around because that action writes the data to the ledger. It's a terrific concept for real-world money transfer, it's basically a super-fast bank-to-bank transfer system. Transfers are confirmed by means of recording them in a digital ledger, in a way that is "confirmed" across the world nearly instantaneously by the network ratifying it as a done deal with a unanimous vote. Inter-bank money has largely been digital for a long time now,. The way I've heard it, in a sentence, small-fry transactions are recorded and added to scheduled deliveries of large stores of assets when banks clear large numbers of individual transfers as a single transfer between themselves. But these transaction settlements can take days for the aggregate transactions to occur, so parties don't get access to the cash not because it doesn't exist in your bank's hands yet, but because trust is low in the current system because any large settlement of inter-bank trades can take a turn for the worst. I think the idea of a centralized network like RippleNet is to hold all parties accountable in a way that allows banks to ratify who is owed what rapidly and settle before assets even moves. And rarely does anything still physically move in the end, as the big banks that all the smaller banks hold at end up holding accounts at their national/central banks (which then bank with other national/central banks around the globe) which actually hold the vast majority of assets and account balances/ledgers note the movement. In short, RippleNet is supposed to be a far cheaper and even faster method of real-time settlement between more banks, as it also cuts down communication time between the different levels of banks as well. They all receive record of the transaction at the same time if they are listening to the same network.
XRP value is largely superfluous, it doesn't matter in the end, not for the customers of RippleNet. What I've read is the XRP transactions between all the banks are essentially pegged to their local currency at agreed-upon rates; the XRP transfers aren't happening on any retail exchange, there are just recorded on the network when two banks agree.
I probably have a lot of that wrong, but I'm certainly curious about the potential of crypto/blockchains and their tokens to not exactly replace fiat, but to represent it in a faster universal ledger.
Of course what Ripple is doing and achieving with their network has a lot of value, so retail XRP trade will be subject to the whims of perception -- where XRP ends up in terms of value though, I don't think has any real world implication for the network's health and/or prospects. Retail trading, I believe, serves a function as a way to propagate transaction history and write to the blockchain, thereby helping confirm prior transactions. What really happens, *I think* is that tiny amounts of XRP are moved alongside what amounts to ledger data of other asset transactions, and the XRP transaction, really just a tiny piece and unlikely whole units of XRP, is what serves as confirmation. I think the real world network turns that into a sort of smart contract but Ripple itself isn't using smart contracts. I say it's sort of because the XRP transaction data also serves as instructions for banks to settle their own larger transfers.