Ripple Gambling: Pros and Cons

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Cryptocurrency experts’ opinions about Ripple are divided: some say it’s a unique cryptocurrency with huge potential, and some say that it’s not a cryptocurrency at all. Let’s sort it out once and for all, and find out whether it’s safe to gamble with XRP.

Ripple is a payment system for large enterprises, such as banks, payment providers, etc. You can perform C2C transactions with it, but the focus is established on B2B operations, leaning towards huge sums. It’s the perfect way to transfer significant amounts of money overseas and exchange them to whichever currency you wish, and it has enormous advantages over the current most popular system, called SWIFT. With SWIFT, a payment from the US to any European country takes two days, which is not good at all, considering the fact that we’re living in the twenty-first century. Ripple doesn’t need banks to have separate accounts in the recipient countries, operates extremely fast, and has reasonable fees. What does it have to do with digital currency? Absolutely nothing.

What Is XRP

XRP tokens were released in 2012, and by that, we mean that they were literally released. Ripple issued 100 billion tokens and said: here we go, guys, let’s pay with these! The tokens themselves are connected neither to the exchange nor to transfer operations that the payment system handles, and banks don’t use them to transfer their funds. This is literally a separate project, but the unique thing about it is that it doesn’t rely only on itself, as other cryptocurrencies do. It is backed up by the system. Right now, XRP market capitalization is slightly above $16,6 billion dollars, while the cost of one token is about $0.39 at the time of this writing.

This currency doesn’t use blockchain technology, because it’s based on entirely different algorithms. It’s not decentralized either. In fact, it’s controlled by many trusted nodes, which means that only certain users, verified by the company executives, can handle transactions, while in decentralized digital currencies transactions can be executed by any coin holder.

The good thing about XRP is that it uses its own service for exchange purposes, thus supporting itself and allowing users to pay fewer fees. From a casino perspective, it means that you can easily play both ways: betting in tokens directly or exchanging them to another currency and depositing into a casino.

Advantages of Gambling with Ripple

There are several fundamental advantages that we seek while gambling with cryptocurrencies. We’re talking about speed, anonymity, and low fees, but we’ll embrace all other goodies if someone throws them at us. Currently, XRP stands out from the other digital money variants according to these parameters:

• Everyone used to think that all cryptocurrencies offered instant transactions, but that’s not true. Transaction time differs from one blockchain currency to another, and for some of them, it’s quite significant. For Bitcoin, it’s about ten minutes now. Can you imagine how great it would be if each spin of a slot took you ten minutes? With Ripple, it’s between 3 and 4 seconds, so that’s what we call a significant difference.
• Anonymity is a huge concern for everyone who plays at online casinos, and despite its centralized nature, Ripple keeps all transactions anonymous. There are some issues with this, but we will review them in the following section.
• Low fees are Ripple’s strongest advantage, and we believe that they’re currently the lowest on the market. If one XRP costs about $0,5, a minimum transaction fee is 0.00001 XRP, which is just negligible.
• The low cryptocurrency exchange rate is a serious advantage, as many casino players prefer not to keep their money in cryptocurrencies, which tend to be highly volatile. Here, XRP has a massive advantage over other digital currencies, because it’s widely recognized by banks all over the world. You can exchange XRP tokens to any fiat currency right within the Ripple network with the lowest fees ever. They even offer some exclusive operations, like exchange to airline miles or Amazon vouchers.
• Low exchange fees are good, but what about no fees at all? We’re talking about the Bitcoin Bridge system, which allows you to send BTC without purchasing them. You can exchange Ripple into Bitcoin for the purpose of transfer, which means that you can send Ripple, but your recipient will get the whole payment in Bitcoins.

Aside from all the advantages mentioned above, XRP has one more. Ripple current price is tightly connected to the steady growth of the Ripple payment system, and therefore it’s less subject to volatility.

Disadvantages of XRP

We’ve explained all the benefits, so let’s head to Ripple’s less pleasant features. As XRP isn’t decentralized, it might be affected by the government. We’ve already said that XRP isn’t maintained by regular miners, as coins don’t need to be mined. Maintenance and transaction processing is carried out by trusted nodes in the system, which leads us to a suggestion that if someone pushes hard enough, Ripple executives might decide to change their policies, not in favor of regular users.

Another thing is that there aren’t many online casinos supporting XRP. Not many casinos support any cryptocurrency in general, compared to the number of regular online gambling venues. Still, Ripple is steadily advancing into the world of gambling, and we believe that you can find Ripple casinos, where you can gamble with XRP directly, without exchanging it. What is more important is that quite a portion of them are licensed, allowing you to gamble legally.

Ripple Gambling Is on the Rise

It’s been more than six years since we heard of Ripple for the first time, and these guys used that time to improve their system and make it the third most popular digital currency. Its benefits for gamblers are apparent: you won’t get such fast deposits and withdrawals anywhere, and the fees are so low that you won’t even notice them. It’s perfect for slots and card games. There’s another not-so-obvious advantage: you own a more significant number of coins, compared to other currencies. It’s way more pleasant to hold 64 XRP than 0.005 BTC, isn’t it?