What I've never understood about XRP and Ripple is that originally XRP was meant to only be used for paying for transactions and the ledger was meant to track IOUs between people denominated in some other "real" currency. They had videos floating around explaining the concept. In fact, they were handing out XRP for free to bootstrap the network of users [0] (that post says 1000 XRP, originally it was 30,000 XRP when the post was first created).
XRPs themselves were basically worthless, but it was required to interact with the ledger (you pay maybe 0.000001 XRP per transaction). The idea was that you pass a small amount on to friends and others interested in using it to create their wallet and start tracking IOUs, and you needed to have at least 20 XRP in your wallet.
Somewhere along the way all hell broke loose, Bitcoin got popular, crypto currencies in general got popular and XRP itself suddenly became worth something, the original concept got lost and everything seemed to go off the rails... That's when I lost interest.
XRPs themselves were basically worthless, but it was required to interact with the ledger (you pay maybe 0.000001 XRP per transaction). The idea was that you pass a small amount on to friends and others interested in using it to create their wallet and start tracking IOUs, and you needed to have at least 20 XRP in your wallet.
Somewhere along the way all hell broke loose, Bitcoin got popular, crypto currencies in general got popular and XRP itself suddenly became worth something, the original concept got lost and everything seemed to go off the rails... That's when I lost interest.
[0] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145506.0