What should investors know before investing in XRP?
Investors optimize profit, not moral values.
The links present some investment risks, including that investors could lose in war brought by decentralists, or lose to subjugation by greater centralists, etc. What the investor does with the information is of course up to them, but fool be they to not consider it.
Current bitcoin (and likely almost all of the decentralized crowd) is unusable on large scale.
Currently BTC is, others... maybe, maybe not. Even were some degree of centralization to be part of some designs, there's nothing that says Bank / Corp / Gov will must or should be the default permitted or rightful places to park, permanently or otherwise, the central parts of the designs. The communities and code could perhaps do reasonably well enough to select and maintain some supernodes. Coinspace is trying all sorts of new models, who knows which will prevail.
claims to scale to Visa's 50K tps).
There are coins already proving out research beyond that, look for them. Beating plastic / global tps, expecting one coin to do it all, all sorts of other single focus arguments... while nice thoughts, aren't neccessarily requisite win conditions of this months or next years battles, or perhaps even the war. Being decentralized censor resistant, able to soak up and store value, to spend it wthin competing costs for similar old world transactions, with enough frequency and widespread uses that users will integrate it into their old world payment mix, freedom to travel from coin to coin via exchange, political, social, and much more to it than just "Visa". Allowing to be focused are traps that will kill you.
Too bad the Bitcoin founding father(s) didn't think about this outcome and code the solution.
Too bad as to luck of a first and one shot kill, though that wouldn't really be a rational expectation and they didn't really have to, they showed cracks in the defense, philosophical, legal, political, financial, operational and technical weaknesses, it's up to you to exploit them and take the fortress... the sooner and harder you roll, with sufficiently vast, advanced, sustained and united armada, the better your odds of winning.