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To determine the real potential value of XRP as an digital asset you need to understand what it is going to be used for. What is its business value? You don’t buy Apple, Microsoft or Tesla stocks just because of the name? As Warren Buffet would say: “Invest Only in Companies You Know and Trust”.What is Ripple Doing?According to Ripple but also many other trusted sources, Ripple as an organization is working hard to create real business use and value. They developed 3 major business solutions since 2004:XCurrentxCurrent is Ripple's enterprise software solution that enables banks to instantly settle cross-border payments with end-to-end tracking. Using xCurrent, banks message each other in real-time to confirm payment details prior to initiating the transaction and to confirm delivery once it settles. The XCurrent product is currently being used by more than 150 corporations around the world.XRapidOf all the products, as stand out is XRapid, which implicitly uses the XRP digital asset. Besides the speed and scalability, the use of XRP as the bridge currency in cross-border. xRapid focuses specifically on cross-border remittances. Till now SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) was being used as a messaging system for cross-border remittance. Built for enterprise use, XRP offers banks and payment providers a highly efficient, scalable, reliable liquidity option to service cross-border payments.XViaXVia helps major companies who are moving money access the information in banks with the help of latest blockchain technology. The companies can watch how the money move from point A to point B. It basically works as a portfolio management system for the corporates by moving money from a Corporate balance sheet to a Personal bank account. Banking for corporates is made much easier through XVia.Ripple has been developing all 3 products extensively to explore the possibilities and to develop a solution with real business value. Since August 2018 Ripple has integrated all 3 solutions and calls it “RippleNet”. In my opinion an awesome stealth business operation being executed extremely well by the Ripple management. You should understand that if their goal is to take over SWIFT it would not be smart announcing it until you are 100% sure you can.The benefits of RippleNetBenefits of RippleNet are said to be the following:Access – Entry into a singular global, decentralized network of banks and financial institutions, all subject to a unified framework of standard rules, formats, and governance.Speed – Make use of a rapid real-time settlement system that enables banks to make cross-border transactions in seconds, instead of days.Certainty – RippleNet participants minimize the risk of failure, and provide end-to-end transparency with regard to every payment that is executed on the platform.Cost – The total cost of settlement for every executed transaction is considerably reduced.So one thing is clear! Ripple is developing a solution that will integrate, compete or completely take over SWIFT in the next couple of years. Ripple integrated all their major product lines into one suite to be able to enter the market. We also know that XRP will be used as the token within RippleNet.Why Ripple can compete?Just have look at the image below:To determine the potential value of the digital asset XRP we need to compare the value of SWIFT with the current value of XRPThe existing SWIFT process/valueSWIFT’s annual volume is about $1.25 quadrillion – that’s about $4 trillion per day (4,000,000,000,000). Yes, you read it correctly and you might now start to understand why there are so many XRP tokens. Money needs to be held and moved.XRP tokensThere are 100 billion XRP(100,000,000,000) tokens in circulation, assuming the tokens in escrow are released. The average value of XRP is now let’s say at $0.5 per coin. So the total value is 20 billion $(20,000,000,000).Let’s be pessimistic ans assume that Ripple will only be able to take 10% of the SWIFT market in the next couple of years: 10% * $4,000,000,000,000 = $400,000,000,000XRP potential minimal value then would be:$400,000,000,000/100,000,000,000 XRP tokens= $ 4 ($40 at 100% SWIFT market takeover).But this is not totally correct because now there is only sufficient value to cover the daily average transaction volume of SWIFT.Now we come to the world of assumptions. The question is what the SWIFT/banks are holding currently to cover any huge fluctuations. What if the banks need to hold sufficient asset to cover the total amount of transaction of a week? Let’s do the math again within a pessimistic situation(10% market takeover)$2.800,000,000,000/100,000,000,000 XRP tokens = $28 ($280 at 100% SWIFT market takeover.So once the world’s financial sector recognizes Ripple for its global remittances, its token (XRP) price may surge to $28 to $280.So no, we won’t hit $589 but with the possibility to still buy XRP tokens at $0.5 you still can make a small fortune with just a small investment. For example, if you invest $1,000 into XRP tokens today you can end up with a fortune between $28,000 and $280,000 in the next couple of years.Legal StatementI am in no way whatsoever a licensed, professional, or otherwise qualified financial advisor. Please take my investment information with a grain of salt, get a 2nd and 3rd opinion, and do your own diligent research. Most important of all, never invest what you're NOT willing to lose.

It’s a long answer unfortunately, it’s not so simple because the law typically is 3–5 years behind technology.The information about your assets can be shared by exchanges worldwide without trader's knowledge or even consent. In this short assessment we are looking at popular cryptocurrency exchanges to analyse, if they are in scope of FATCA or the Automatic Exchange of Information (CRS) - meaning are the exchanges obligated to reveal the information about their users and their portfolios?What is FATCA/CRSFATCA stands for Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. The US invented it in 2010 and made it a worldwide law for foreign financial institutions to disclose information on their US account holders directly to the US. If you are a bank or an institution outside of the US trading in financial assets and your investors are US tax persons, then you have to disclose their names and assets to the US on an annual basis under FATCA reporting regime, otherwise you have to withhold 30% tax. FATCA is very US-centered so if you are an investor and not a US tax person, you are not affected.However, if you live in one of the OECD countries that have committed to exchange foreign taxpayer information under the Standard for Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information in Tax Matters (CRS), starting in 2017 in respect of 2016 financial data. CRS is based on FATCA concept. The OECD thought that if US can have information on its taxpayers to check whether they disclose their foreign assets on their US tax returns, why not do it for other countries? So the OECD countries made it happen and one hundred countries have already committed to exchange information and are referred to as Participating Jurisdictions. Under the CRS Standard a financial institution (bank or broadly any other institution trading in financial assets) in country A that has an investor resident in country B (A and B agreed to exchange information under CRS) will annually send information to country B on its taxpayer disclosing the taxpayer's name and assets.CRS & FATCA have sound legal frameworkThe legal framework for disclosing the information under FATCA are the Intergovernmental Agreements between US and other jurisdictions (check if your country has signed an IGA with US). If your country did not sign an IGA with the US, it still does not relieve it from sending the information to the US under FATCA as every foreign financial institution is still subject to the FATCA regulation.The legal basis for exchanging information under CRS are the CAA agreements. The list of countries who have activated exchange relationships for CRS is published on the OECD website.How do the popular exchanges deal with FATCA/CRS today?I have not found any information about their approach to compliance with FATCA/CRS. A company that is offering a cryptocurrency on an exchange platform could be considered a financial institution for FATCA and CRS, because it is offering a currency to worldwide investors. Although FATCA does not mention e-money, the OECD is indirectly implying that an electronic money provider is not excluded from the definition of a financial institution.If the exchange is in the US, it is outside of scope of FATCA. If it is outside of the US, it falls automatically in scope of FATCA and also CRS, if the country of where the exchange is located have committed to share information under CRS.EXAMPLE 1 US based trader investing abroad: If you are a US investor who purchased cryptocurrency on a non-US exchange, you might be subject to FATCA.EXAMPLE 2 Swiss trader investing in Germany: If you are Swiss investor who purchased cryptocurrency on German exchange, your account might be subject to CRS.The financial institution or the exchange platform does not have to be subject to the local banking regulation and does not have to have a banking licence to fall in scope of FATCA and/or CRS, nevertheless has to be compliant with both regimes.Although popular cryptocurrency exchanges do not mention their compliance with FATCA/CRS both traders & exchanges could be in scope of FATCA/CRS.Is cryptocurrency in scope of FATCA/CRS?Most likely yes. Cryptocurrency, like any other currency might be a financial assets and FATCA and CRS are all about disclosing financial assets held by foreign investors.What investor information is being shared under FATCA/CRSThe financial institutions have an obligation to collect information on its account holders under due diligence rules and then report this information annually, typically using an XML file according to FATCA or CRS reporting schema. They disclose the names of the investors, their address, tax identification numbers, account number, account valuation and total payments made to that investors within the reporting period.Kraken caseIn order to demonstrate how CRS/FATCA rules apply to a real life example, I decided to take a look at Kraken, one of the leading exchanges with a European focus. The platform is extremely friendly and easy to use, definitely worth trying out!Based on their website, Kraken is a cryptocurrency exchange based in San Francisco, trading Bitcoin, Ripple, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies to anyone in the world. It seems to also be registered in the Companies House in the UK under the name Payward Ltd and its nature of business is Financial intermediation not elsewhere classified.From my personal experience Kraken uses a bank account in Germany for traders’ deposits. If you want to buy a cryptocurrency, you have to send fiat currency (e.g. Euro or USD) to the bank account in Germany to then purchase crypto coins.When you sign up to Kraken you need to "get verfied" and Kraken collects information such as your name, country of residence, date of birth, verified proof of residence (utility bill). Kraken asks all the questions a financial institution would ask for due diligence purposes and perhaps to be used later for reporting purposes.Is Kraken subject to FATCA / CRS and who reports?Very likely, but let’s look at the detail to see who needs to report what.The bank in Germany is without any doubt a financial institution and subject to FATCA and CRS. It is subject to FATCA under German IGA with US to disclose information to the US on US taxpayers. It is subject to CRS because Germany committed to share information with other Participating Jurisdictions and will disclose information on foreign tax resident to other OECD countries.Scenario 1 - Bank account held by Kraken USGerman bank as part of its compliance obligations will perform due diligence on its account holders among which Kraken is expected to be identified as a foreign account holder. Now the question is, is Kraken a US person or tax resident in one of the CRS Participating Jurisdictions? If the bank account is held by Kraken as US entity, the bank may report to the US informing US that Kraken-US has a bank account in Germany and provide a year end valuation.Scenario 2 - Bank account held by Kraken UKIf Kraken as UK entity is the account holder, the bank may consider sending the information to the UK under CRS on its account holder informing HMRC that Kraken-UK has a bank account in Germany and disclose its account balance at year end, unless Kraken-UK confirms to the bank that it is also a financial institution and will do its own reporting under FATCA and CRS.Scenario 3 - Kraken is a financial institution and reportsKraken is, among other countries, registered in the UK. It can be considered a financial institution for FATCA and CRS as it is offering and trading with cryptocurrencies that are most likely considered financial assets. The UK and the US have an IGA in place and the UK is also one of the CRS Participating Jurisdictions. Under both regimes Kraken may need to disclose information on its foreign account holders. If a US investor has an account with Kraken, Kraken may have to report that investor to the US under FATCA. If a French tax resident investor has an account with Kraken, Kraken may have to report that investor to France under CRS.What about other exchanges?As you can see it is never a straightforward answer and the reporting obligations depend on many factors and variables. Here we studied one example and the answers are likely to be different for Poloniex, Coinbase or other exchanges.ConclusionIf you are a bitcoin investor and trading on an unregulated cryptocurrency exchange, information on you and your investment may still be disclosed under FATCA and CRS regimes. It is probably worth to consider your tax and financial situation now. In case you have not disclosed your investment in bitcoin on your tax return as one of your financial assets, one of the exchanges might need to do it sooner than you think.This is a fascinating new area, where compliance, finance and tech meets. I am curious to read your comments and questions as this chapter on crypto compliance is still to be written.

2018 was not a good year for the Bitcoin. By December 2017, the cryptocurrency had peaked and was worth almost $19,000. At the beginning of 2018, it still stood at more than 17,000 US dollars at times, but in December it was only worth around 3,200 US dollars in some cases. Will the exchange rate recover and if not, in which cryptocurrency should one investin 2019?These days, there are a lot of legitimate offers online that gives great advantage to cryptocurrency investors where they get double of their invested cryptocurrency on platforms like www.underatedcryptos.store. These are opportunities that need to be really utilized to its maximum.Should you even invest in cryptocurrency at all?Before turning to the question of which cryptocurrency to invest in 2019, let’s briefly ask whether someone should do this at all. Because there are several reasons against such an investment.There is no “real” value behind a cryptocurrency, i.e. no machines, patents and land as with a stock corporation. A problem that also affects all traditional currencies. If people lose confidence in the euro, a 100 € bill will eventually be nothing but paper.However, the Euro is clearly less volatile than the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. A large danger is thereby the fact that more than 95 percent of the Bitcoins only approximately 4 percent of the users belong to. These players, therefore, have gigantic market power. They have a self-interest in not letting the currency fall too strongly, but under circumstances, they could also take high losses in order to secure their profits before a further price decline also eats them up.Bitcoin and other Altcoins still have great growth potential in 2019, especially in recent weeks when Bitcoin has risen from $5200 to $7200. The bear market is over, it’s time for the bulls. And also time to pay your taxesBitcoin and its potentialDid you know?If you had invested 100€ in crypto currencies like Bitcoin in 2010, you would have tokens worth about 1.025.556,33€ today! Find out now how to invest in cryptos in 2019.Why were Bitcoins invented?Since the Internet was invented in the ’90s, access to this medium has grown tremendously. The door to the virtual world and thus a worldwide trade is open.The worldwide trade with different currencies makes payment transactions more difficult, as often high fees and processing time of several days are not uncommon.With Bitcoins, these worries are a thing of the past.With the virtual currency, it is possible to send a transaction from Germany to Japan within a few minutes for an incredibly low fee.Here no intermediaries like banks and the state are needed, but it can be sent directly from a wallet (“virtual purse”) to a destination address of another person.The disadvantage of this, of course, is that an Internet connection must be available, regardless of whether it is provided via the laptop, the tablet or your own mobile phone. Furthermore, cryptocurrencies are popular attacks for hackers. It was not uncommon to read in the headlines that large crypto exchange exchanges such as Coinbase or Poloniex had stolen considerable amounts of money. This makes it all the more important to have a hardware wallet. This means that you carry your current account balance on a USB stick or other storage device including your passwords.The acceptance of Bitcoin increasesIrrespective of which heights the bitcoin shoots to during the next run: The still enormous market capitalization of the coin of over 60 billion euros speaks for itself. The investor base does not intend to say goodbye to Bitcoin as soon as possible. Many people continue to believe that the Bitcoin Market is still unfolding its potential and that the market is still at its beginning.Also for new price increases speak the many positive signals, which pulled themselves in the past weeks and months by the news: the acceptance of cryptocurrencies rises — also with the regulatory authorities. Bitcoin Investment Trusts are no longer a rarity. Possibly the next price increase is even imminent.Good time for BTC Investing?Which brings us to the benefits: Investing in Bitcoin 2019 can pay off extraordinarily right now because the general skepticism towards BTC Investing is great. With a little luck, those who invest now will be among those who got on board before the next big hype — and will be happy about big profits after a while. Expressly: That doesn’t have to happen, but it can.The advantages of blockchain technology cannot be denied: Bitcoin is a decentralized, digital currency that passes over the middleman (financial institutions and banks) and makes it possible to participate in trade worldwide even without a bank account of one’s own: a democratic currency model in the best sense of the word that can hardly be stopped. Because it is not considered possible to manipulate the Bitcoin with a hack using the current technical means. Bans can still become seriously dangerous for Bitcoin: As long as only a single computer mint the Bitcoin, it remains tradable.Ethereum the not so silent competitorWhile Bitcoin is a pure cryptocurrency, ethereum can do more. Ethereum intends to use its technology to replace third parties who store our personal information. Ethereum’s goal is to decentralize our personal information.Here is an example: Some of us may use online document services or online work platforms to work together on projects. Others store their information such as photos, insurance letters, invoices, etc. in the Microsoft or Apple cloud. We, therefore, transfer our data to third parties and trust both the data protection and the integrity of the data.Whether this is really guaranteed cannot be checked by us. Ethereum’s vision is that the same functionality that Google, Apple and Facebook offer will be created through new distributed applications based on Ethereum technology that will return control of our data to us, the owners of the data. No one but the owner will be able to access or modify the data. More about this and the technical background later.Ether and Ethereum — the technology of the future?For many, ethereum is the successor to Bitcoin. This can be seen, among other things, in the fact that the market value is already (currently) about half of the Bitcoin. Whether and when the Bitcoin can be overhauled and the so-called “flipping” is achieved is difficult to predict. From our point of view, Ethereum provides a technology that will be groundbreaking in the future. However, both Ethereum and the cryptocurrency Ether are still in a relatively early development phase. So there are still some important challenges to overcome before stability similar to that of the Bitcoin is achieved.As the number of Ethereum-based applications increases, the question arises what happens to poorly programmed smart contracts that disrupt the network or, in the worst case, block it. How does the Ethereum Virtual Machine deal with this? Due to the decentralized leitmotif, manual intervention is not possible. This contradicts the nature of the blockchain, which is supposed to be unchangeable.Another, so far unsolved topic is the total number of tokens. Bitcoins are limited to a maximum of 21 million tokens. Nothing will change here. With the ether, however, it is not yet clear how many tokens there will be. Currently, there are over 80 million tokens, 72 million of which were created in the Genesis crowd sale. Moreover, the “Difficulty Bomb”, which is supposed to prevent inflation, is only just beginning to take effect. This means that the more the computing power in the network increases, the more difficult the cryptographic computing tasks that the miners have to process become. Whether the difficulty bomb of the ether “works” or whether the slowdown reduces production too much (due to a lack of financial incentives for the miners) remains to be seen.Another problem that has arisen due to the rapid growth of the ether is scalability. Thus, the Ethereum network has to cope with rapidly increasing user numbers. On the day before the crash, 20.06.2017, more than 300,000 ether transactions were carried out, a record for the only two-year-old cryptocurrency.For all open questions: Ethereum is only at the beginning, in its second of four phases, and thus has enormous development potential. It has the chance to become the programmable money of the future. For this, however, the tasks described above have to be solved. In addition, there is a need for strong cohesion in the community, which must support the changes to be implemented. The potential is there in any case.Good time for Ether Investing?As paradoxical as it may sound: Above all the great skepticism of the present gives rise to the hope that a current investment can pay off properly — at least in the long run. Those who invest now may be among those who profit from the next big hype — provided they interpret the signs correctly and get out again, while everyone else invests excitedly.So much for the theory. The advantages of blockchain technology are numerous and you probably already know them: Ethereum is a largely decentralized, digital currency that bypasses the middleman (financial institutions like banks) and allows people all over the world to develop dApps on the Ethereum ERC20 standard. Because investments are also possible without a bank account, people who do not have a bank account are given the opportunity to participate in an investor market for the first time. At the same time, the Ethereum blockchain can hardly be manipulated by a hack due to its technical architecture. At least with the currently available technical means, this is almost impossible.Earning with Ethereum: numerous possibilitiesThere are many different ways to earn money with Ethereum. Investing in Ethereum 2019 is possible through Ethereum Investment Trusts, but also through Banking on Ethereum. Alternatively, you can trade Ethereum derivatives — or simply buy Ethereum’s cryptocurrency Ether directly.If you buy Ethereum or invest in Ethereum shares, your investment in Ethereum will depend exclusively on the market price. The situation is different with Ethereum derivatives trading with crypto brokers such as eToro: here you can still earn with Ethereum even if Ethereum falls. When trading with CFDs you speculate directly on the price behavior of Ethereum without buying the cryptocurrency yourself.ConclusionBitcoin and Ethereum are still a good option to invest. The bull market of the last weeks only confirms this. But before you invest please always do your own research and do not just jump on the hype train like everyone in 2017. Think about your decisions and take a profit from it.