About a year ago, I bought some Ripple (XRP) through Coinbase. My coworkers and I were all buying Bitcoin and Ethereum and a few others. It was a lot of fun. When the SEC lawsuit against Ripple caused Coinbase to halt all buying and selling of XRP, I figured I’d just leave it there, because why not?
So it was with tentative excitement that I watched the recent “pump XRP” meme. Here’s what one of them looks like:
A few things about this bothered me. The first is that Gamestop already happened, so you have a bunch of people who are looking at this and drooling. Big money would realize that the “pump” would actually happen in the days before the scheduled action. They’d get in a week early and actually dump at the proposed pump time.
The hopeful part of me (lol) had fingers crossed that that wouldn’t happen. It would be nice to see XRP get up to $10 or so. I’d make a very large ROI, off something I didn’t have any expectations over. But hey, it didn’t happen (at least not yet). The peak (75 cents) happened about two hours before the proposed mass-buy, and now it’s back to 45 cents.
This all feels like a big game of rock paper scissors, where everyone anticipated the same thing and acted accordingly. At least on my end I didn’t invest a single penny over what I already held. Thanks, instincts.
As it stands, I’ll just keep holding it. I think I bought it at 30 cents or something? I can’t remember. The number “26” keeps popping into my head, maybe it’s that. It can go to zero and I’d be out a hundred bucks that I spent a year ago. I have probably lost ten times that on unused subscription services over the same year.
I’m on the “crypto is the wave of the future” train at the moment. It’s less important to me how much USD this translates into, and how potentially useful it is as an alternative currency in the future. I will steadily put a little money into Bitcoin every month, not in the hopes of one day trading it all in for a mountain of cash, but because in the future a trustless deflationary currency will be massively important to hold. For cricket protein or whatever.
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