
Hostile takeover effort by Valor of XRP - okfine
https://www.axios.com/token-takeover-battle-brews-for-ripple-1547570363-8f4b4b10-6df2-49b8-8863-ce5fb2edddd2.html
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hrdwdmrbl
If only the cryptocurrency market were even rational enough for this to work.
You have projects like ETC and the many Bitcoin forks that are total junk
clones but still have value. You have projects like Tron which plagiarizes
their whitepaper and clone ETH and still has value. You have Dash which cloned
Monero and the founders took all the coin and it still has value.

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nostrademons
I mean, rationally speaking the value of _all_ cryptocurrencies should tend
toward zero. But then again, rationally speaking the value of all _currency_
should tend to zero.

Human beings aren't exactly rational - if we were, the modern world would
cease to exist, and we'd collapse into a Hobbesian state of nature.

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stephen_g
That's not true for all currency. Because Governments generally require
taxation to be paid on property/transactions/income in particular geographical
areas exclusively in a particular currency, there is a _baseline demand_ which
means that such a currency has some fundamental value despite not having
"intrinsic" value.

Beyond that, currencies are (in a way) also _backed_ to some extent by the
value of the goods and services available to be purchased with them.

So cryptocurrencies can have value of the second type, but if they don't have
baseline demand then there's little to stop everybody deciding to switch from
one cryptocurrency to another at some point in time, leaving the first
worthless - whereas baseline demand makes that extremely unlikely for a
currency used in any major country's economy.

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jerguismi
Taxation does create demand for government currencies, but it doesn't
necessarily make it more usable in commerce. You could do all your
transactions in other currencies, and only convert to the tax currency when
you need to pay taxes.

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jhanschoo
Considering the first order effect, you are right. But because governments tax
only in their currency, they have a vested interest in making their currency
valuable. This makes the US dollar more reliable than your friend's IOU for a
favor.

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wbl
How on earth do you short while simultaneously buying at a premium? This not
how any of it works.

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hrdwdmrbl
I also do not fundamentally understand their plan. According to the article
they will short XRP, clone XRP, then somehow get people to switch from the now
worthless XRP in to their coin which would somehow not be worthless, then they
will give people that switch more coins while still keeping the value of their
coin high. Sounds crazy expensive and crazy risky.

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arcticbull
This is just like the time the USD was hostilely taken over by the GBP and I
had to exchange all my dollars for pounds so they wouldn't be worthless.
Unless I was a government employee, then I was SOL. Truly the money of the
future.

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tmoravec
USD taken over by GBP? I'm curious, and I don't know enough of the history.
Could you provide some details, please?

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pitaj
He's being facetious.

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sharpneli
Levels and levels of plotting.

What happens if the takeover fails? Well. Valor has the XRP of those dumb
enough to exchange their XRP for the Valor tokens. Valor tokens are worthless
and then Valor can just sell the XRP for profit.

Unless they spend too much in shorting they stand to profit from those who
believe their takeover will succeed.

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sm4rk0
Could this title be less clickbaity? By including hints like "Ripple" and
"Valor", for example.

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dang
Ok, we've edited the title to try to do that. Though the grammar is not the
most un-awkward.

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tagawa
Thanks, although the attempted takeover is of XRP (the digital asset), not
Ripple (the company).

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dang
Ok, edited that too.

