Has Tiffany Hayden been spreading FUD lately?

After a discussion with her, my conclusion is that there is a chance that she genuinely believes that she is not spreading FUD. But it's also not hard to see why many people see it that way.

The discussion happened here:

Something has happened to @haydentiff. This is for sure. I don't know what it is though. If this is not fear-mongering, I don't know what fear-mongering is. First, why would Ripple abandon XRP. Second, no validator would do that because it won't work. https://t.co/g6CDp1Gkiq

— r0bertz (@r0bertz) February 10, 2020

The initial tweet reflected my thought at the time I was posting the tweet. I am not going to change it.

So now let me summary how it went.

In the so called "FUD" tweet, Tiffany described a scenario "If Ripple abandoned XRP, the validators would vote to increase reserve to 25K XRP to freeze almost everyone else so we could cash out first".

My response was:

Ripple won't abandon XRP because it has every incentive to keep XRP but no incentive to abandon it.

Below are our message exchanges about this. My thoughts are in parenthesis.

Tiffany: It's incorrect to assume that Ripple would take care of things.

Robert: It's not Ripple taking care of things, but taking care of itself. 

Tiffany: Ripple continues to remove validators from the network and has a goal to go down to one or even zero. (As if this is an example that Ripple doesn't take care of things and that Ripple is abandoning XRP)

Robert: This is a serious allegation (I mean the part that Ripple has a goal to go down to one or even zero). And if it's a goal, it should be either one or zero, not "one or even zero".

Nik: Ripple has a goal to go down to one validator.

Robert: I am not worrying too much about this as long as Ripple keeps hiring an excellent team to work on rippled and it would be stupid for Ripple to give up this team.

Nik: Although Ripple has a large and highly skilled team dedicated to development of rippled, I’d prefer to see more external contributors. (I read this as Ripple is still committed to XRP.)

Freezing everyone else by increasing reserve so that they could cash out first won't work.

Things got heated up on this one. I will only give a high level summary.

So in the beginning, I assumed that increasing reserve to any amount would always require an amendment and that someone must send a pull request for this amendment to https://github.com/ripple/rippled to get it merged. If anyone does this, I would know because I follow what's happening there. If this pull request gets merged, people with less than 25k in their accounts would start moving their fund immediately. No one will be freezed.

To my surprise, it seemed that Tiffany didn't know how rippled development works, or rather how github projects work in general. It didn't take too long for me to realize that what she really meant may be that the validators can collude privately and thus don't need github.

Then this still can be undone. Because it's easy to create a fork and getting it recognized by the world is going to be easy too, because the old UNL betrayed the world. See this article for technical details https://r0bertz.blogspot.com/2017/07/several-possible-attack-modes-on-xrp.html 

Later XRP Scan pointed out that reserve can be increased to 4294 XRP without introducing an amendment. But 4294 is not a too big number. To increase it to 25k, an amendment is still required. Either way, it can be undone.