Ripple and XRP

Anyone have any experience or ideas about the Ripple cryptocurrency. Someone was asking me to review some stuff about investing in XRP for the appreciation potential. The document reads to me a bit like this scene from Star Trek, TOS.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v77SF4TFUoM]

I actually do think the technology behind Ripple is impressive and could be game-changing if it proves to be 1) immune from hacking, and 2) immune from government attempts to shut it off. But I sense that the Ripple network may be able to take off without the value of XRP following in its footsteps, because the transactions can actually log any currency, and don’t need to use XRP unless they want to.

Is there something I’m missing? As of 2 weeks ago, I had never heard of XRP, so I’m wound up in the various ways to try to understand how to value a currency.

I once wanted to write Algo trading platform based on XRP, but transaction cost was too much to make any money. Appart from that their API is clean, and i think their devs are pretty strongs.

How to value? You can’t value that. It is purely demand/supply based, but i think regulatory + specific risk is way too much

For example:

http://www.coindesk.com/price-ripple-xrp-plummets-co-founde-9-billion-selloff/

P.S> If anyone has any legit idea on Algo trading in crypto currencies (Backed on some real data anylsis with backtesting) PM me and maybe we can make a product out of it

Was always interested in that when I had some money in bitcoin a couple years ago and you would see these massive arb opportunities across markets. The fees everyone would take along the way trying to consolidate your positions seemed to make it almost impossible at a level of funding I could afford unfortunately. Dont really follow these markets much anymore however. Did make a 10 bagger out of sheer luck back when bitcoin made its first jump from like 23 to 250.