I came across this article where it hypothesized that Ripple is combined effort of all the banks to remain in power. And they're buying the limited Bitcoin and al currencies and replacing them with currency which can be generated as and when they want.
Let me start with an analogous story.
Once upon a time, in a village, people used to trade silver as currency. Only the head of the village had silver mine and hence only he had control over the value of silver.
A group of people found a gold ore and, found this glittering metal to be very precious. They started trading with gold instead of silver. Eventually, it became popular and everyone started using gold instead of carved stones. The head, fearing the loss of power started mining gold. In the meantime, he also started circulating carved stones (initial version of coins) as a currency.
Using the huge chunk of gold he had mined, he started inflating the value of stone coins. Eventually, people started to believe stone coins are more valuable than gold, and people traded their gold for stone coins. Eventually, the head collected most of the gold from circulation. The silver got replaced by stone coins. Full Circle.
The head of the village here is banks. Silver is all existing currencies. Gold is cryptocurrencies and stone coin is (pseudo-cryptocurrency) Ripple(XRP).
If you're wondering why I'm calling Ripple a pseudo-cryptocurrency. Major 3 reasons are,
Not minable: It's more like current currencies where the centralized group decides how much do they want to generate, which is unlike most of the cryptocurrencies which are limited in nature. It'll have all same inflation and similar issues when the group generates too much of it.
Anonymity: LOL! You need to provide all details beforehand. They decide whether you can have an account or not! :P
No say in it: Community had no say in the decision made by the core group.
I'm no expert, and might be wrong! Feel free to comment, argue or share your thoughts about it! :)
Image Courtesy: Pixabay