By I’ve been watching this peculiar phenomenon unfold in the XRP crypto news space. I’m not sure what to call it, but a publication will write a poorly sourced article which will subsequently be used as a source in a different article, and so on until you’ve got a daisy-chain of disinformation stretching across publications. Even more peculiar is that these “journalists” will proudly display their name and face on an article like this, where even the most perfunctory research was not done, and the information from the dubious source is heaped onto the page as if it were from the bible itself, and we were an early seventeenth-century civilization that took that word as, well, gospel. The article that I’m speaking about is titled Could Ripple CEO’s Own 2020 Prediction Spell Trouble for XRP? from the newsbtc.com publication, which references an interview with Jefferey Tucker about Ripple on RT.com.
While the discussion on RT.com about Ripple and XRP was positive, both the commentator and Jeffery Tucker got several essential details about XRP wrong. The commentator proclaims that the XPR ledger is centralized, and Jefferey Tucker, the one whom they are interviewing, offers no correction. In fact, he nods his head as though this were the truth. Tucker’s answer to the question of why XRP hasn’t seen a price increase with the recent large scale commercial adoption of Ripple tech is that XRP is “mediated and proprietary technology,” and because of this, it is not as exciting to typical crypto investors as other blockchain technologies like ETH or BTC.
Where did he get such a notion? He no doubt heard that XRP was mediated and proprietary from some other cryptocurrency enthusiast, who heard it, or read it from someone else and repeated it without doing any of their own independent research. To non-crypto enthusiasts, the pejorative “centralized” doesn’t seem like a bad thing, and I would guess that Jeffery Tucker and the anchors with RT.com didn’t feel the need to verify this statement, as in any other kind of field, having a centralized authority structure would be regarded as a boon. But to cryptocurrency enthusiasts, decentralization is a Shangri-la. Anything less is undesirable, unclean, and untenable.
RT.com repeated the incorrect statement that XRP is centralized and proprietary, and this statement was subsequently heard and picked up by newsbtc.com and used as a source in the above mentioned Could Ripple CEO’s Own 2020 Prediction Spell Trouble for XRP? The author asserts, using Jeffery Tucker as a source, that investors fleeing smaller cryptocurrencies won’t likely turn to XRP because it is a “specific kind of crypto.” And as I indicated above, Jeffery Tucker meant by that statement that XRP is “mediated and proprietary,” and the ledger itself is “centralized.” Which, as most XRP enthusiasts know, is patently incorrect, and is often repeated by Bitcoin maximalists or by proponents of other coins to disparage XRP. The loop of disinformation goes round and round, jumping from the mouth of some Twitter or forum troll, into a news broadcast like RT.com, and then it ends up being repeated by written publications, which are again used as a source by trolls.
But, lets for a moment, assume that Tucker’s statement on XRP’s desirability is true. How do either of these publications explain the 2017-2018 period when XRP reached a price of $3.40. Crypto investors didn’t seem to care about XRP being a “specific kind of crypto” back then. They saw the opportunity for profit, and the price of the coin skyrocketed. What has changed that would make another price increase like this impossible? Have cryptocurrency enthusiasts suddenly started caring more about libertarian fundamentals than making money?
The biggest problem that Ripple seems to have is that their competitors are habitually dishonest and that publications, whose journalists should be capable of better research, repeat lies and fabrications about Ripple tech.
Ripple representatives discussed Coinmarketcap’s fake volume problem in a recent Ripple Drop episode. A study carried out by Bitwise indicated that Coinmarketcap’s Bitcoin trading data might be exaggerated by as much as 95 percent. Coinmarketcap is the same organization that was so “concerned” with representing numbers accurately that they excluded XRP data from Korean exchanges because they felt that it impacted the accuracy of XRP’s price representation. They excluded this data without telling anyone and caused many to panic that the price of XRP had dropped drastically overnight. This is illustrative of how dishonest some of these organizations are. If the rest of the cryptocurrency space turned their critical eye inward, the entire crpytosphere would be in a much better place. Or at the very least, potential investors wouldn’t have so many lies and so much disinformation to wade through that most decide to throw their hands up and walk away from the tech entirely. Would you be willing to invest in a technology where its publications seem incapable of doing basic fact checking, and the biggest market cap listing website reports trading volume data exaggerated by 95 percent for one currency, while being selectively accurate towards a coin it doesn’t like?
