Ripple? What you need to know before you invest.

I hear a lot of people promoting Ripple. That concerns me and I have the urge to shed some light on Ripple.

More then 75 banks already joined the Ripple platform. Great news, right? Yes for the banks. Not really for us.
Ripple is not open source. It is not decentralised. It is just a private and centralized blockchain tool for banks to have cheaper and faster transactions. With the benefit that it stays business as usual for them.

Just some logic. Banks are not obligated to use Ripple's (XRP), but if they do the transaction costs will be lower. With that in mind. If banks use XRP between them to do transactions and the transaction fees are payed in XRP. Would it be in their interest that the Ripple price became a 100 dollars or even 1000 dollars? Would they not flood the market with Ripple's to control and manipulate the price of Ripple? In a way that the transactions cost for themselves stays at a minimum and make more money because of it? Just ask yourself this questions. As @valderrama points out in his reply beneath my post. When XRP starts to get scarce, Ripple will flood the market with XRP and that will push the price down.

I am not saying you should not invest or claiming you could not make a profit. But why support a system where the main reason is not to make things better for us all, but to let banks earn even more money. Banks will control and manipulate the Ripple supply and there will be no free market price. They can do this as there will be a total of 100 billion Ripple's. Half of it retained by Ripple itself and the other half for the biggest part owned by banks. You do the math. This is how I see it and hope that I shed some light on what Ripple from my point of view really is.

Thanks for reading.