Bitcoin firm Ripple Labs followed the footsteps of other cryptocurrency companies hiring former fed officials to join their group, as they recently welcomed former US State Department official Anja Manuel to their strategic advisory board.
In her work at the US State Department, Manuel has been part of the negotiating team for the US-India civilian nuclear accord and contributed to developing US policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the moment, she also works with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a co-founder and partner at consulting firm RiceHadleyGates LLC.
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Last year, Ripple Labs already appointed Susan Athey, a professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economics Policy Research to their bitcoin firm board of directors. Then in January, Gene Sperling, a former economic adviser to both former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama also joined the company’s board of directors.
Ripple Labs appears to be making significant progress in transforming bitcoin to a more acceptable means of payment. Just recently, the bitcoin start-up firm confirmed it had joined the International Payments Framework Association (IFPA), which provides rules, best practices and guidance on how to improve cross-border payments. It is also affiliated with SWIFT and Automated Clearing House (ACH).
Prior to this, the company announced that CBW Bank and Cross River Bank have adopted their open-source payment protocol using bitcoin. Ripple Labs CEO Chris Larsen says that the company plans to grow bitcoin’s international acceptance and adoption by various financial institutions with the help of the former federal officials they’ve hired.
Just this month, another bitcoin firm BitFury announced that it would be hiring former DOJ criminal division head Jason M. Weinstein to be part of its strategic advisory board.
LuckBeAWeidoTonight 
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cohagen 
Please stop calling Ripple Labs a bitcoin company – it is not a bitcoin company. CEO Chris Larson called bitcoin an “unneeded” currency and said ‘“We don’t think the world needs a new currency, we already have plenty”. There you go.
Made me cringe everytime I read the word bitcoin in this article. Where the hell did they get that Ripple Labs is a bitcoin company. Not all Cryptocurrencies are bitcoin, plus Ripple itself is an attempt at a different standard/protocal. Because you can transact with dollars on Ripple labs services we could surmize “Ripple Labs a dollar company” I suppose.
So reassuring when a technical article is written is such a non-technical manner. Swap upper and lower case letters as though there is no distinction twixt the two. Perhaps the author is more DOS-like than Unix-like, case insensitive. CEO Larson may have said BTC is superfluous but as long as it is here Ripple is willing to skim its ‘cash-flow’.
Time to go ‘chown’ some coin.
As much as I agree with you, the author is using ‘bitcoin’ with the lower case b not the proper noun ‘Bitcoin’ version. So I can only infer that he’s using ‘bitcoin’ to mean ‘crypocurrency’ not the specific one we all love. And I would guess the reason for this is for SEO.
Calm down! It’s all equally crap btc, ripple ect… Yes the world does have plenty of types of cash money not the best but it’s what’s accepted. All the coders/liberal anti govs and so fourth in the world can’t effect a shift away from it on any meaningful scale so like Esperanto alt/crypto/btc ect will linger used by a passionate few but to the world at large…meh…. Unless a bunch of you go found your own nation and make it your national currency, then that could actually work, a group in Japan did it last year so it can be done. I’m not joking put your money where your mouth is. Make history! It would be just like the NOD.