3 weeks ago I would have said not to touch Ripple because no bank will ever buy a coin from an investor. They will get all their coins, essentially for free, with their Ripple Labs contract. And I'd tell you it's a closed system where only banks can validate transactions so banks could collude and modify the blockchain and change rules as they see fit. So worthless to buy. The last investor to buy the coin loses it all.
But regardless of whether it really started off as a coin nobody but other investors would buy, suddenly Ripple Labs was looking at a coin worth a couple billion dollars. Built up in value on a dream by those who either did not understand what it really was or somehow invested anyway in what it could be.
Ripple Labs isn't stupid. They have this enormously valuable asset now. They will transform it into what the market always believed it was. A payment coin that can handle a tremendous number of transactions that can be used to buy stuff. People tell you the downside is that it's centralized? Ripple has announced intentions to decentralize it which means to turn it from a bank coin to a cryptocurrency that competes with LTC and BCH.
So, where can this go? While people are building lightening networks to speed up Bitcoin by removing the blockchain from the bitcoin transaction (so, not really using it as Bitcoin then, are we?), here's a real coin that is really lightning fast.
So, now, I'm hot on Ripple.