The cynic in me sees this as a cheap PR move (an SVP of marketing promoting it doesn't help). Associating your token with a good cause gives it credibility in the eyes of the public which in turn leads to an increase in the XRP price in USD. Here's what I understand about ripple:
- 100 billion XRP was created at inception with 20 billion going to the creators and 80 billion going to Ripple labs.
- It's supposed to be a payment layer between financial institutions and XRP is the underlying token.
- Distribution of XRP is arbitrary. Ripple labs can allocate it to whoever they see fit.
Donating $29M worth of XRP costs them nothing since Ripple labs holds 80 billion XRP. Only 40 billion XRP is currently in circulation though and XRP's price is currently $0.5. I don't know, I find Ripple quite ridiculous. But the silver lining is donations such as these.
This is the key.
Ripple has donated $29M value out of the portfolios of their XRP-holders. The effect of this, might be a net-increase of that value, though, since the marketing-effect might even pump the price.
If you own XRP, you just donated a fraction to a good cause. Congrats.
Very similar to how Europe "printed" money to "save Greece" several times. A worthy cause, but paid by everyone holding Euro: every Euro just gets some inflation and the shaved-off value is used "for the good cause". I'm not saying inflation is bad, that is not my point. Nor that giving to good causes is bad, and my point is also not about wether or not the combined wealth of Europeans should be used to save a county.
My point is that giving away other peoples money is easy and hardly ever presented as such.
(If anyone reading this likes their products, that's fine. Just realize what you're getting into first. It's actually a very entertaining currency to watch from the sidelines.)
Can u please elaborate what are the other traits a coin can exhibit other than providing value? And what are the other purposes of coins such as bitcoin/litecoin/ether etc.
It's great that Ripple decides to donate money to charities but it's not like they're making a huge sacrifice here. Given the highly speculative market surrounding crypto the good PR this gives them might very well end up making them significantly more money than what they donated.
That being said, I would love to witness a super-rich person throw a one-time insanely large lump sum of money at some problem. Like, "Here's 50 billion dollars. Free mammograms to anyone on the planet until the money runs out." It would be nice to see a global respite from some sort of issue.
I feel like that's a dangerous plan. The Gates Foundation invests a lot of time and energy into making sure its money is well-spent and effective. Throwing a "one-time insanely large lump sum of money" at a problem sounds like a recipe for graft and embezzlement on a colossal scale.
The toughest problems are the ones that resist throw-money-at-it solutions. You can't just give money to poor people; you have to do it in a way that coincides with guaranteeing they understand how to use it to escape poverty, guaranteeing it won't be stolen by a corrupt regime, etc. etc. etc.
>Like, "Here's 50 billion dollars. Free mammograms to anyone on the planet until the money runs out." It would be nice to see a global respite from some sort of issue.
That would cover one mammogram for every woman in America. If donated to anti-malaria charities, it would save about 25M lives (more or less, according to GiveWell's estimates, which may not scale to that much funding). According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that's a little over half of what it will eventually cost to eradicate malaria.
Solving the world's problems is expensive.
I could see a scenario where, sure, the teacher's proposal is great. But what makes their proposal any better than the thousand others that cannot be funded?
My wife's school strongly suggests that she submit a project every year. If it's funded, good for her and the students in her classroom. It's also good for the school since they can then allocate available funding for infrastructure or larger programmatic support (e.g. ESL, special needs, etc.). It's not that the administrator doesn't want to fund her projects, it's just that her requests sit in a huge pile of unfunded requests and something has to give.
Source: wife is a teacher who has successfully funded projects through donors choose.
How is that a downside?
Have the foreign donors actually built a school? Or have they built a mansion for the army chief?
not arbitrary private citizens who see a “good idea” (that might turn out to just sound like a good idea) that helps a small segment of the population
*edit: i’m saying if you fix the education system, take that donor money and then make it available to all then everyone could benefit equally without having to beg for scraps for literally a countries future generations
Page isn't loading but this is from the subject of the blog;
#BestSchoolDay 2018: Every Project Funded! MARCH 27, 2018 STEPHEN BURKENEWS
#BestSchoolDay is here! Last night, Ripple fully funded every single live DonorsChoose.org classroom project. That’s over 35,000 projects in one enormous $29 million dollar act of generosity. We literally don’t have words to express our gratitude, so we had to invent some. We’re flabbermazed. Astonified. It blew us away, knocked our socks off... WOW! Here’s a message from Ripple and our founder, Charles, talking about why Ripple chose to support our creative community of teachers with this [Read more...]
edit: Someone's going hard on downvoting every comment in here. Do you not like teachers receiving money to help their students?
It's a shame that you need charities for such things.
1. FUND MILLIONS OF STUDENTS (I don't think anyone can overstate how awesome this is)
2. Give Ripple Labs good press and put them on the front
3. Increases the supply of XRP which:
- Means more XRP in the market in the market for more users
- Drops the value per XRP making transaction costs cheaper
Wait, it does? I thought one of the unique aspects of ripple was that all of the coins were pre-mined so the supply is finite. Right?
Also, for the teachers, what happens if the price falls before they can dump and their projects have a shortfall?
Not to take anything away from Ripple: good for them!
Still, the utilitarian view on this is only good - it helps a good cause and is better than nothing. donorschoose only gains from this and every pledge that stands behind donorschoose.
People are always quick to scrutinize everything, but what do you do to help the underprivileged?
For perspective, Warren Buffett has donated $46 billion and Bill Gates has donated $18 billion to charities since 2000.
Either way - good to see good projects get funding.
Are they profitable? How can this kind of thing be justified to shareholders?
They don't need to derisk their ecosystem.
>Of the XRP80 billion that Ripple Labs was gifted, Ripple follows a distribution strategy that encompasses payments to business partners such as gateways, market makers and charitable organizations.[24]
So that prices don't fall overall while this happens and some people cash out of it.