I've made many counter-arguments in previous posts to this affect.
XRP can only get more decentralized as time goes on and Ripple continues distributing tokens out into the wild. It's not like a fiat currency that can just be printed out of thin air. Once the premine is spent it is gone forever.
The XRP community is also very strong (but even more toxic than Bitcoin maxis).
Strong is strong though so it's a bonus and a huge reason why they won the case.
The entire community took it upon themselves to tell the SEC to fuck off.
None of this is relevant to the current discussion.
In fact the worse I make XRP look in this post the more impressive it is that they won the lawsuit.
I've already gone on to say that this is a victory for everyone.
That alone gives points to Ripple.
It's just a matter of context.
but it means its been able to spend over $100M on lawyers to fight the SEC
Is that right?
So how much does a lawyer cost?
This is actually part of Brad Garlinghouse's bullshit and deceptive talking points.
Obviously Ripple didn't hire 1000 lawyers on six-figure salaries to work this case.
He's acting like the XRP price going down from the lawsuit is the vast majority of the cost.
Even the most high profile court cases only cost a couple million dollars.
The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions.
Seriously though Brad Garlinghouse is trash just look at how many people believe this silly $100M bullshit story. I believed it for a long time as well until I actually started thinking about it.
The XRP community is absolutely awful. They just seem to believe the stupidest possible things... but their conviction was a huge part of this case as John Deaton took 3,500 XRP holders and counter-sued the SEC.
I think the $100M in legal costs is totally possible.
Look at the first page of this usgov document on litigation costs:
Lawyers cost like $1000 an hour and they would have had to go through a trillion documents from both Ripple and the SEC and a bunch of related stuff for 3 years. The fees for a single lawyer working on this full time for 3 years would be like 5 million.
But anyway, I guess my question is... is there anything that could convince you personally that XRP is not bad?
Lawyers only cost $1000 an hour if you're a pleb that can't afford to buy in bulk and the hours are low but the specialty is high. Those are the kinds of prices people pay to the best criminal lawyers to keep them out of jail. Not for some paper-pushing SEC case.
But yeah circling back to the main point: yes XRP could turn out to be pretty good if the right circumstances present themselves. Until then I remain extremely skeptical.
Totally fair to be skeptical. What type of circumstance do you mean? Something to do with the technology itself or more the funds allocations?
Hm no just the ecosystem as a whole would have to prove itself legitimate.
Basically it's all about job and wealth creation.
Any crypto that can't actually build a circular economy will get left in the dust.
Most won't.
Until people get paid directly for their labor in crypto I'm not impressed.
As far as I know only Bitcoin and Hive really done that in any significant capacity.
And Bitcoin is going to have major scaling and deflation challenges.
Did a bit more looking around and maybe $200M on a multi year lawsuit is possible?
Still not sure how those numbers add up.
I think in really any lawsuit, the real winners are usually only the lawyers.
Haha yeah I can't wait for AI to totally gut that entire industry and make litigation dirt cheap.
Will be a good laugh for sure.
It's already happening really.
The ability for AI to make discovery x1000 times easier is already in the works.
Man, I hope so... although there was that report of a lawyer using ChatGPT, and it was just straight up making up cases for precedent ... but I'm sure there are some massive savings here and people can start to confidently go through legal proceedings without lawyers.
Yeah but chatgpt is generic image what it will do when the AIs only specialty and purpose is case law
Oh yeah, I keep forgetting about that. Microsoft has been meeting with like every business to sell it's custom-built LLM.