Bitcoin Forum

And drive prices down.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133023.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133096.0

some of you operate on the bigger fool theory and will try to sell before the others to buy back cheaper.
This will take place between now and the time ripple goes out of beta when realizing the mistake and bitcoin go back up.
You heard it here first  :D

Who takes ripple as payment?

Ripple is not a direct competitor to Bitcoin, it's something that can actually make Bitcoin more useful. Ripple is not a currency specifically, it's a transaction & credit system that can be used with a number of currencies, including Bitcoin.

exactly, but I do you expect the sheeple to get it?

I think it will start from the small things.
It often happens that someone hasn't enough money on their wallet/debit card/bitcoin wallet/paypal account or else to pay the dinner/videogame/service/pizza/... (I'm talking about people that we know and trust for these small things)
Ripple will be used on our smartphones as a simple "note" for all these cases.

After a while there will become available the first connections between people that we don't know directly, and here we will start to see the "magic" of the system :)

The more people are willing to accept other than national currency, the better for bitcoin. It's not important who's gonna do the marketing.

Not to mention businesses with many transactions in both directions.  Ripple keeps score and bitcoin is used to settle up at the end of the day.

Pardon my french, but what the fuck is Ripple? And why should I give a flying fuck?

My best understanding is that is a bitcoin-otc style web-of-trust plus dated IOUs.  When you have an IOUs to pay, it can be satisfied by a bitcoin transaction or by the other party issuing their own IOU before yours is due.

Ripple certainly looks interesting...but its no bitcoin. It looks like a fairly difficult thing to get off the ground anyway. Which is I guess why they're trying to use this community and bitcoin in general as a launching pad.

Ripple honestly sounds like the worst idea I've heard in a long time.  I see no impact on BTC.

For now Ripple is closed I guess. If I go to the site and click any menu item it asks me for a login. I cannot read anything. Pretty weird way to market something ...

This Ripple thing seems like paradise for confidence scammers.

what nobody is talking about:

ripple apparently has its own virtual currency. this is the 'potential trojan horse'.

100 billion(?) units pre-mined? No, thanks. I'll pass. lol

This this this this this

I really can't wrap my head around how anyone thinks this is a good idea. At all.

Confidence scamming doesn't work the same way in Ripple as it does in traditional web of trust networks. Ripple is based on relationships to people you really know (like your closest friends in real life) and the network builds up from there. There is no direct link to totally unknown people, everything goes through known friends. There is little possibility in Ripple to scam unknown people since scamming will actually hurt the people closest to you.

It's the closest friends of a scammer that lose the most in case of a scam, which means that in a Ripple economy you need to choose your friends wisely. You can trust less known people directly of course, but the amount of money that could potentially be scammed through that link can be limited to small amounts very easily.

Personally I think it's a promising system but the actual implementation is still in alpha stage.

FTFY hehehehe :D

I must say you have a point: I didn't sell from $30 down to $2.5 last year because I knew bitcoin wasn't affected fundamentally by the gox hack and bad press. However the "idiots" drove the price down anyway ;).

I'm pretty sure ripple wont have such a strong effect, though.

Prosper was an enormous failure (for the "investor").  Ripple will follow with those two idiots at the helm.

I can only imagine how I would implement a ripple system myself, and am very excited at the possibilities. I plan on using the system from day 1 of launch. Waiting for the initial discussion thread.

So it's a credit system. How will it manage interest rates? Or are you just assumed to lend money without compensation?

Whatever lender and borrower agree to I guess.

its still very much alpha, not even beta yet (though thats what they are calling it and i am in it). But from what I can see so far, if it does take off, this will be the catalyst which takes both ripple and bitcoin over the moon leaving fiat behind. They both complement each other using this system.

If I want move $1M from MtGox to my bank account can Ripple do this. NO ! Will anytime Ripple be able do this ? NEVER!  Bitcoin is future not Ripple. :-)

EDIT: but maybe you will able to buy coffe with Ripple. :-)

Oh right this thread, as it seems we are on track.

Right now you idiots want to pay upto a Bitcoin for the 50K XRP you got in the giveaway thread. At this rate XRP has already the same theoretical market cap as BTC....

I am just sitting here with my ripples. Not knowing what the hell they are for ??? Like a G+ user and their ghost town of friends. Trade debt? With who!? I think you must be mistaking me with another nerd who has friends :D

Sounds right to me.

Even if they did, their money would hardly matter.

Whats this I hear about destroying XRP's after usage?

Quite convenient for the founders.

I'll also ask again.   How many have ever been betrayed by a family member?   Answer,  more than you think.

You can lend under any terms you want. Ripple doesn't compel any particular terms. The actual agreements are outside the scope of the system.

Gateways typically lend against 100% collateral, which makes it pointless to charge interest. If I hold $100 of your money and loan you $100, there's no reason for me to charge you interest because that interest equals the interest on the $100 I hold. That's the best way to build a payment system.

But Ripple fully supports other terms. You could charge someone interest instead of holding cash as collateral. You could charge an issue fee and make it settle on demand. You could allow the balance to float in either direction for mutual paying convenience and not settle. Whatever.

Ultimately, we don't know what model will win out or whether different lending models will co-exist for different circumstances.

You want to know what I think? Scam or not, your system desperately needs help. I have spent hours trying to understand why I would ever use your system (http://redd.it/19jrn3). As far as I can tell, there is literally no reason for me to use your system over btcjam.com or bitcoin-otc.com. In fact there is less of a reason because you seem to be hellbent on making your system as complex to use as possible, and you seem to have a chokehold on a majority of the xrp. Is this the truth? How in the world would I know!? You don't address any of these things on the wiki or your website.

You can loan other people money through the net, so what? Why in the world would I buy xrp? They seem to have no value, even as a debt trading instrument. I understood bitcoin right away after reading their wiki and I was able to resolve all of my questions without having to ask for the help of others. Your system is explained in circles.

Ripple is good because you can trade debt! Trading debt is valuable. So because trading debt is valuable, Ripple is valuable. QUICK, BUY RIPPLES BEFORE YOU UNDERSTAND!

Wut!?

I have been watching quietly for months, and I haven't seen a single person give a good explanation as to why people should use/buy ripples. Not here, not on reddit, not on your forum, not on your website, and not on your wiki. Where in the heck are you hiding the positive aspects of this system? I am starting to think people are purposefully withholding information.

Heck, at least the litecoin people make sense! Someone wanted to try and compete with bitcoin and get into a cryptocurrency early to be like the early adopters of bitcoin. Good for them.

Is there some key piece of information which has passed me by? Because by all means, please share.

The interface is so bad that I do not even know how to loan any type of money, bitcoin or otherwise, to anyone!

The thing which boggles my mind the most is that lots of energy seems to be being put forth to get people to use the system, but no energy is being put forth to explain the system to the masses!

Just use it. xrp are valuable. The system will change the way debt is exchanged. It is revolutionary.

What in billions of blue blistering barnacles is revolutionary!? No one seems to know! No one can explain! Am I the only one who is massively confused by this system!? I was interested because someone told me that Ripple might help take the load off the blockchain in the near future. Sounds great! Now what?

Am I paranoid about Ripple? Hell no, I am frustrated as all heck by it!

/rant

I apologize to all who have been caught in the crossfire. This has been bugging me for days.

Very well said.   I concur.   I usually catch on quickly to concepts when explained well.

Ripple is not.   And what I do understand I don't like.

I'll pitch in and say, ripple is very confusing.

That's about the best I can say about it.

That is all.

Yes, you missed the whole point! Ripple is a *payment* system that allows you to pay people in fiat currencies like dollars in much the same way you can currently pay people with Bitcoins.

We're not promoting Ripple as a lending platform.

Ya hard to understand this. It IS in alpha stage so..... My interest in it revolves around the (possible?) potential to electrify silver or gold bullion. The problem I can't get over is it requires a very high % of population to use it to be really viable, and if a bunch of nerds are confused.....

Bitcoin is not easy to understand, but Satoshi published a paper of academic standard to explain the mechanism, before the  implementation is available. People who are not willing to open source their code could do this, and they have been doing this all the time.

Could the people behind Ripple do the same thing as well? Bitcoin forum is by no means the best place to distribute information about Ripple, and nobody who wants to do peer-review of the system should be expected to come here to read the threads.

You are 100% right. We do need to do this. Explaining bits and pieces of understanding that people are missing is no substitute for laying the entire system out in a clear and organized way.

Until more information is forthcoming, I'm going to assume OpenCoin's so-called "Ripple" implementation is just another pre-mined alt-coin (XRP), but this time with corporate backing and using Ripple as its mask to get in good with the Bitcoin community. What does OpenCoin care if the debt features of the system never take off and everyone just uses XRP like BTC? They just profit all the more, providing no one notices the bait-and-switch until after the system has reached critical mass.

Ripple is the facebook of cryptocurrencies.

Yet again with the cyclical thing! Then why not just use bitcoins!? What is the advantage of having to add a layer of abstraction on top of my bitcoins other than offloading transactions from the blockchain? And I will still need to wire people my usd if I use this to trade usd, and we all know that bitcoin stomps that system into the ground!


... lol what? Direct from the wiki (https://ripple.com/wiki/Consensus#1000_people_in_a_room):


I understood that this is a poor analogy, but this is exactly what I am talking about. This kind of explanation is only leading to more confusion and misunderstanding. Your wiki is about as clear as a mudpuddle.

I agree that the case for using Ripple to pay in Bitcoins is not very strong. Ripple makes more sense as a way to make fiat currencies act more like Bitcoins. However, there are a few reasons:

1) Ripple has faster transactions.

2) Ripple allows you to pay in dollars even if the recipient wants Bitcoins.

3) Ripple allows you to receive dollars even if you are paid in Bitcoins.

4) Ripple offers the ability to use community credit to borrow or lend Bitcoins.

As I said, the case is not very strong.

One nice thing though -- every merchant who accepts Ripple will be another merchant you can pay in Bitcoins. Once Bitcoin inbound gateways are set up, you'll be able to take a merchant's Ripple payment information, get a Bitcoin amount and account to pay from the gateway, and then the gateway will deliver the Ripple payment once you make the Bitcoin payment.

I agree, it's very unclear. When I say we're not promoting Ripple as a lending platform, I mean by the common sense definition of lending. Technically, it is lending. For example, when you have $500 in the bank, technically you have loaned the bank $500. But we don't think of it as lending.

For you to have the Ripple equivalent of $500 in the bank, a gateway must announce that it owes you $500. But that's not a lending platform.

I have to say, good luck with that. Without my help you won't ever get any of my friends and family to understand or want to use Ripple. It is hard enough to sell them on bitcoin! Does anyone think this company has the funds or muscle to make a critical mass of people want to use it's currency? I am only just beginning to understand it, and that is because I have done an INORDINATE amount of research. I wouldn’t even try to explain this to my family, bitcoins were hard enough.

Not to mention that if bitcoin keeps moving with it's current momentum nothing is going to stand in it's way. This company is dreaming if they think they are going to overcome over all of these hurdles without some massive grassroots campaign. Do they even have the manpower/money to try and attempt this? Do they think the bitcoin community is just going to up jump ship? <sarcasm>Because I am sure all of the Libertarians and people on the Silk Road will love to use this centralized currency which is owned by a corporation for their trading purposes.</sarcasm>

The only way I can even imagine this working is in direct conjunction and cooperation with bitcoin community. Are there any reasons why we should help this company? Because I was under the impression that the blockchain problem was being worked on and that it should not be taken as a serious issue currently.

-_-


#1 Please don't doublespeak me, it is something which gets under my skin. I get enough of that from the news, politicians, and bankers.

#2 If I am correct when I say it is a loan system then don't try and call me out over nothing. If I am not totally correct, please inform me about what I am missing.

#3 I live in the US I and understand quite well I am loaning my bank my money. What do you think the economic crisis was all about? Do you think I want to loan the bank my money? The bastards at my local bank bankrupted a multi-million dollar college scholarship program (http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20111226/ARTICLES/111229671) which was given to our community by a generous millionaire who passed away. The higher education of thousands was wiped away in an instant because some assholes at the bank just had to invest in real estate which was not covered under the strict rules set forth by the millionaire’s trust fund. Want to know what takes the cake? This bank was promptly bailed out by our government (http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/entities/154-exchange-bank).

Why do you think I am here on the bitcoin forums trying to escape the usd and the massively corrupt banking system?

Plenty of normal people understand that their money is a loan to the bank. Occupy Wallstreet wasn't a tea party.

What you are proposing is the textbook definition of lending. What other possible definition of lending do you think exists? Credit cards? Bank loans? Car loans? Business loans? They all come from a bank unless you have some rich friends, family, or are good friends with a loan shark. And even then those are just different forms of the same process. Don't try and sell me on some phony definition of debt or try and sweep it under the rug.

Debt has its place in the world. People need debt. When debt is used properly, you can get ahead in life. But there are these scumbags at the top who are stealing from the American populace. Directly. No conspiracy, no convoluted schemes, just plain theft. In the wrong hands, debt is a tool to enslave a people. So excuse me if I am not good friends with debt.

If you are proposing a centralized debt based system then you better be up front about it.

I am not liking this the more I understand, and it's not because I don't like debt. I would love to have a p2p distributed debt issuance system which is not controlled by the banks.

I am not liking this concept because people seem to be skewing the truth or withholding information. I am reserving judgement for now but color me unimpressed. Especially because all of this seems to be cornered by one company trying to make a buck.

I think you guys from ripple are in the wrong forum if you are trying to sell your product which is not completely designed to complement our desired currency revolution. This place is filled with some pretty smart people and a lot of people like myself who don't like or trust companies or banks. They just don't like people messing with their money, why do you think so many of them are gold and silver bugs? And I am sure that no one wants people monetizing or abusing their currency revolution.

You guys might want to step up your game if you believe you have something to bring to the table. People seem to be getting the wrong idea, myself included. If you want to be selling shovels when the gold rush strikes, you are going to have to let the miners know yours are the best.

What is your elevator pitch? Because your communication skills need polishing.

Joel, when are you going to realize that you can't just keep throwing out all these claims without explaining the details/mechanisms behind them.

Those of us who have looked at the cursory information so far provided have not been impressed.

Xion is right, you'd better step up your game quick or you won't get another chance.

i have alot of clients who happen to be estate attorneys.  we often talk about their work.

of course they're biased but the universal theme is that families should have an estate plan in place.  i believe them and have one in place for my family.  when it comes down to dividing the inheritance amongst siblings all kinds of problems can crop up which can tear apart relationships.  i certainly can believe it myself as when my parents passed away, i had a sibling who kept asking/justifying for more and more b/c he was in an inferior financial situation to the rest of us.

bottom line, no matter how much you think you can trust a good friend to perform on an IOU at one point in time, there can certainly come a later point in time (IOU's have time related counterparty risk) where that trust may no longer apply due to changing circumstances.  there needs to be a well defined plan in place to mediate disputes.  and it has to be legal.

since they didn't cost you anything, you should just throw them in a drawer somewhere and forget about them for 10 years.  if they happen to go up in value then you win.  if not, no harm done.

oh wait.  if you don't circulate them, then how will they go up in value?

why did Jed McCaleb sell mtgox right at the wrong time? he gave away a gold mine.  oops, sorry.  a Bitcoin mine.

he says it's b/c it was for security reasons.  no.  it's b/c he didn't understand the potential of Bitcoin.

now you expect me to believe in Ripple?  especially when he and the other founders are holding back 50 Billion XRP's for themselves?

I don't get the rant.

If you don't want a system to pay in any currency/commodity pair by micro-loaning money by "rippling it" through a p2p social network, that is run by a slightly shady group of people who premined the coins and don't really know how to work the public or make their operation not seem shady - don't do it.

Easy as that.

Does this thread exist so JoelKatz can personally attend to your ideological issues regarding the role of debt in modern society and in the modern socialist government/banking system? IDK, probably not, but I'm just guessing. Joel will you be his shoulder to cry on about the local bank stealing the kids' scholarship money or whatever? I get it, debt's evil. Or banks are evil. Or the expectation of government bailouts causing banks to take unrealistic risks with loan money is evil. Or something. What was the point of that again?

As for ripple, if it doesn't take off due to trust or centralization issues, someone else will come along, frankenstein the concept with other features that work better, and launch a new one. Whatever. That's how the market works.

I would like a system where I can trade any currency or commodity pair electronically through a web where I only have to trust my closest friends (btw, DUH OF COURSE YOUR FRIENDS CAN BURN YOU, the idea being that you have more options for recourse being burned by a friend vs being burned by a random stranger on the tor network. And you have more options for determining eligibility for trust in regards to a known individual rather than a random anon from the internet. But folks, feel free to continue stating the obvious. **** YAAAWWWWNNNN ****** )
Whether Ripple is able to provide a system like this that meets my standards of decentralization, open source standards, etc... is to be seen. Right now things look a little iffy in the way that they've managed public opinion and the openness of their project. And there may have been a better way to distribute coins, lol... didn't they know their current method was going to have bitcoiners screaming "PREMINE! PREMINE! STAY THE F@@@ AWAY!" I mean, come one, people, THINK about how what you're doing appears to the BTC community with their tin foil hats and ron paul bumper stickers! Audience, hello?

Maybe they're hoping for a more mainstream adoption, i.e. the facebook type people who initially ignored bitcoin will be like "Hey I'll give this ripple thing a try, their website looks real nice and the concept is hard to understand so it must be hip and ironic," and once it takes off the bitcoiners will feel obliged.
Who knows.
Like I said, I'll stay at a safe distance, see what happens, see how the Ripple team shapes things (right now looks like they got some work to do ;-)). Hopefully someone else will come along, steal the concept, and launch it the RITE WAY.

I guess I don't understand why this particular issue is so confusing. Maybe I've done a bad job of communicating.

We're pitching Ripple as a payment system where most people extend "trust" only to a gateway. People using the system this way can make and receive payments and they don't ever owe anyone anything and their friends don't ever owe them anything. We believe this is the best use for Ripple for the most people in the short term. Ripple can provide numerous advantages over conventional payment systems such as irreversible payments, high-speed confirmations, cross-currency payments, low fees, and so on.

Yes, Ripple can also be used other ways such as to extend social/community credit to friends. But we're not expecting people to actually do that to drive the system. Personally, I think long term that may become Ripple's killer application and may change the way people think about money.

Okay I think I got it.

Bitcoin works like gold, where the more of it you have, the richer you are.

Ripple works like fiat, where the more of it you're owed, the richer you are.

Ripple only works with Bitcoin if you're literally expecting to be owed in Bitcoin.  Otherwise, they can work perfectly separate from each other, and you can still expect dollars or baht or pounds or SteveCoins, whatever your preference is.  Is this the point of Ripple?  To unify all the world's fiat currencies, whatever they may be, into one gigantic system of IOU?

_{Oh god please say yes}

That's how we're pitching it because we think that's the use case that appeals to the most people in the short term and solves expensive, real-world problems that people actually have today. Long term, people will use it however it best serves them and that's very hard to predict.

I do not understand. I can send money directly to anybody in the world using Bitcoin with ZERO risk.  Or using ripple? I'll give $10,000USD to my fiend, he give them to his friend (then 6 other I never saw)... and if one of them is cheater I have lost $10,000 USD. This is Ripple ? If somebody buy me a coffee I can give him $1M ?

EDIT: I'm sorry I do not have so trustworthy friend.

It's not zero risk. There's a risk that a 51% attack will devalue the currency. There's a risk that a speculative bubble will collapse and devalue the currency. There's a risk that Bitcoin will collapse and leave you holding something that's worthless. These aren't high risks, of course, and it may make perfect sense to take them. But it's not zero risk.

No, that's a misunderstanding of how Ripple works. You can only lose money if someone you chose to trust betrays that trust. Other people defaulting cannot harm you.

Payment paths only exist for the instant a payment is made. After that, it's just balances between people who have chosen to trust each other.

To use a check analogy, say you pay your landlord with a $400 check. He deposits that check in his bank. Now your bank owes you $400 less and his bank owes him $400 more. So he considers you to have paid him $400. But if his bank collapses, that doesn't harm you. He chose to trust his bank and his bank accepted the check. It's only if your bank collapses that you may be out money.

You gave him a $400 check that was acceptable to a bank he chose to trust. That ends your end of the bargain. Him getting the $400 from the bank that he chose to trust is his problem. And, of course, my bank paying his bank is his bank's problem, not mine or his. If his bank agreed to accept checks from my bank, then if that goes wrong that's their problem.

You can never wind up being owed money by anyone you didn't choose to trust.

I believe the point is, if your buddy isn't using Bitcoin, or you're expecting payment from a person who isn't using Bitcoin, you could use Ripple with any currency :P

You are comparing the risk of a 51% attack with the counterparty risk?  That is insane!  A 51% attack is now pretty unlikely while someone NOT PAYING (counterparty risk) is a huge risk.  People fail on debts ALL THE TIME.

You really shouldn't be extending Ripple trust to your friends unless you've got real good friends. Social relationships and banking relationships don't often work together very well. To use Ripple, you probably want to have an account at a single gateway, and trust only that gateway. Your Ripple balance with them is like a bank account balance – they owe you money, but you have a "withdraw on demand" agreement with them, so you can turn that balance into "real" money whenever you want.

And you can't send money with zero risk with Bitcoin. There's no counterparty risk, but there's a huge exchange rate risk. Ripple lets you do Bitcoin-like transactions denominated in whatever currency you like, and the cost of that is letting a third party hold some of your money for a while. If you can't trust anybody at all, you can't use Ripple.

:-) It will take me 10 min to teach him what is Bitcoin and how to withdrawn his money I'm sending (then 1 hour until transaction is confirmed 6 times). ... try this with Ripple:-) ... impossible

Actually, the comparison between these risks is not as simple as you make it seem, especially because you have to take into account not just the probability of the risk occurring but also the magnitude of the damage if it does. But all I was doing was disputing the claim that Bitcoin is zero risk.

I certainly agree that if you want to pay Bitcoins to someone who wants to accept Bitcoins, there isn't much of a reason to use Ripple to do it.

Streamlining and simplifying is critical to mass adoption, I agree. Bitcoin has had similar problems in the past, made great strides towards improving, and I think it has made a large difference.

exactly

• Ripple is a settlement protocol
  
  Bob is my friend.  I have granted him $1 trust in Ripple.
  
  He can utilise this in two ways..
  1. I could sell him an apple and he sends me $1 ripple IOU.  He now owes me $1.
  2. Or maybe he ripples $1 from me, through him to someone else, he now owes me $1.
  
  I would know about the first one because something in the real world was exchanged and the ripple balance went to me. I might not know about #2 immediately but either way the result is the same.  Eventually Bob would pay back the debt at some later date.  At the end of the day ripple is just a settlement protocol, you owe, then you settle the debt back to zero.  You cant owe too much because peoples trust is not unlimited.
  
  Edit: Even if Bob never pays you back in Ripple, when the time comes where you have to pay him, you just say, i'll take it off your tab.. and send him back his IOU.
  
  
• We all need trust
  
  Trust is an integral part of advanced human society, you cannot survive without trust.  You trust your job pays your salary each month, you trust that the shop you ordered something from actually delivers, or that the item in the box is as it claims, or that the shop will refund the item if it doesn't. You have to trust other drivers to obey the road rules, you have to trust farmers have grown their food responsibly, you have to trust governments to do the right thing.  You have to trust your family will look after you in times of need.  
  
  Without trust you are on your own, I spose you could live in a cave with your own vege patch, pray that there is no natural disaster that destroys your water/food supply, cause you cant trust anyone else's food!
  
  We trust a million different things each day to operate as an advanced society.. Even Bitcoin has huge amounts of trust, we trust that the developers are honest with the software, and that the code reviewers are honest about their reviews, that the OpenSSL libraries have not been updated to created private keys that dont have a master key back door.  We cant check every part of everything all the time, there's just not enough time in the day.
  
  
• Bitcoin exchanges are gateways
  
  If you've ever used a Bitcoin exchange before then you are already using a Ripple style gateway.  They simply hold your balance (or at least say they do) and allow you to do your trades and cash out.  You have to trust that the exchange will honour their IOU to you at some point.
  
  Ripple will standardize the way gateways, banks, exchanges etc represent a balance (in the Ripple system), it will be a standardized protocol for settlements that is not run by any one organization, and will be free and open for anyone to use once they publish the source.  I trust they will publish the source, and if they dont, I wont use it.
  

I cant see anything wrong with Ripple, it compliments Bitcoin nicely, its another powerful tool to help take control of our own finances.  I'm quite surprised how many Bitcoiners have poo-poo'd the idea.

At the end of the day, Bitcoin spreads the money/debt risk over everyone who uses/holds it, where as Ripple focuses the risk on only those who you have trusted.  For short term, fiat money transfer, exchange (mtgox, bitstamp) deposits use Ripple, for long term savings use Bitcoin.

My problem is the way in which XRPs are being distributed. I greatly prefer BTC's method of monetary expansion.

XRP are irrelevant.. hence why i never mentioned it. I got enough for a lifetime of Rippling.. why would I pay more than 1 satoshi for them?

XRP aren't really an altcoin :P  But I think it's the XRP which is the most confusing aspect of Ripple.  I get everything else so far, but I don't know what I'm doing with these ripples exactly--isn't that what the IOU's are for?

The XRPs allow you to pay transaction fees. The idea is simply that they're not available in infinite supply so someone who wishes to clog the network with meaningless transactions (say moving IOUs back and forth between accounts they control) won't be able to congest the network forever. In periods of transaction overload, the Ripple network raises the required transaction fee, essentially auctioning off the available transaction slots. If an attacker wants to keep your transaction locked out, he must put more XRP behind each of his clogging spam transactions than you are willing to put behind your one important transaction.

Transaction fees are destroyed. XRP are used for transaction fees because they're the only currency Ripple can manage at the network level without requiring a central authority to hold or destroy them and with no risk that an attacker can put himself on both sides of the transaction fee payment.

Currently, the normal transaction fee in Ripple is set to 100,000 transactions to the XRP. (Just like in Bitcoin though, individual nodes can refuse to relay a transaction if they think the fee is too low or they are locally overloaded.)

Can I have some?  I don't have any and have no clue how to get them.

They are only irrelevant if you have plenty.

The distribution of XRP is certainly an interesting problem, I look forward to seeing how OpenCoin and the devs choose to distribute them freely once they are out of Beta testing.

I'm feeling generous, post your address and i'll send ya some.

Were you talking to me too? ;D

rH2kyKcurSYu92fAEENB2W7hrZ4k5DXWoR

I have zero at this time and would like to try them out.

I don't even know where to find the code to build it and run it so I don't have an address.  Point me to where I can get started and then maybe I'll let you prove how irrelevant they are.  :P

Currently it's fully centralized and closed source, so you have to use the ripple.com web client. OpenCoin says they will open it "soon".

Hmmm....

Edit: rBSA2TQR8L5yvm54GFQoJMjyHwANi8VbTi

I won't trust it with much until I see some code.

Sent.

Generosity all gone.

If anyone wants more, go ask at ripple.com/forum

You can make it seem like a complex comparison but it is not.  NOTHING is ZERO risk.  Not even the USD that most people buy BTC or settle Ripple with.  And the magnitude of the damage if USD fails is a lot bigger then bitcoin failing. 

For our purposes, the risk of using Bitcoin is pretty low.  99.999% of the time or more the payment will go through.  I do not think the odds of getting paid back in ripple are nearly as high. 

I am going back to being a lurker on this topic, if I hear something positive to overcome all of the negative I might come back. This is just too frustrating to understand and I have decided that it is not worth pursuing.

What I understand which has made me give up:

• Ripples are pre-mined and possessed by a central company
• Seems like someone is trying to make money off me
• I received no roi on my hours of research and I am cranky

OP, your sig is not what 'Schroedinger's Cat' means

Huh? That's where he comes from? Hmmm, that may explain everything....

It's not an assumption, we should take it at its face value unless proven(nobody cares to do I guess) otherwise.

And you could be right about his motives, but unlike proudhon's trolls, he used some serious amount of left-brain power to come up with some very scientific-sounding bearish arguments, his bear post thread is one example, although I have noticed from time to time he has (maybe) willfully neglected evidences people confronted him with. My guess is that he may wanted to talk the price down, but loathed to use the kind of tactics other bears employed.

Let's look at a case: Egyptian dude working in Hong Kong want to send money to his loved ones back in Egypt every month.

• With bitcoin: Dude uses a China-based currency exchange. Wires his HKD from the paycheck to that exchange, withdraws bitcoin. Sends bitcoins to his wife in Egypt. She uses maybe some dude she found on localbitcoins.com to sell the bitcoins for local fiat currency EGP.
• With ripple: Dude uses a China-based ripple gateway. Wires his HKD from the paycheck to that gateway, withdraws HKD to his ripple wallet. Sends EGP (implicit currency conversion) to his wife in Egypt. Wife in Egypt uses "Alexandria ripple gateway" to redeem her EGP to paper notes.

I don't see the difference in required trust.

Let me show you another case:

A brilliant Chinese/Indian guy excels academically ever since he is a child, and goes all the way to graduate from a prestigious American university, then finds a job in a big investment bank, and starts hanging out with all kinds of wealthy elites.

One day, his poor relatives/old buddies suddenly find out that they could borrow massive amount of credits, all thanks to this brilliant kid's social network, and they immediately start borrowing with joy, then this poor kid wakes up to see himself accumulating a mountain of IOUs, all simply because he hasn't properly configured his Ripple client, you could hardly say it's his fault, it's very hard for anyone to foresee such a thing. Well aware of his old  chaps' payback abilities, he figures that he has made enough in the America to live a comfortable life in his home nation,  and most likely the court there would not hold him responsible for such things, it's better to leave this nation immediately than being chased around by his elite friends ever since, so he books a ticket immediately and leaves the nation, leaving his American friends to f**k themselves.

Now of course, you could argue his American friends should not have trusted him so much, but what if, let's say, there are one or two more additional intermediaries in between? Things will get a lot more unpredictable.

The moral of this story is, when you deal with an exchange, you are always expected to willingly enter into contract with another entity, while using a P2P network to propagate debts/credits will very likely get some innocent people caught in a pile of debts, hardly with their knowledge.

An important property of Ripple is that it is *impossible* (without an error) to end up losing more money than the sum of all the trust you choose to extend. You can't accumulate a mountain of defaulted debt unless you extend a mountain of trust to people. Conversely, if you extend somebody trust of 10 BTC, you are extending them the ability to take 10 BTC from you. Ripple doesn't magically make loaning money to people a good idea.

Edit: Also:

When you trust somebody, you are trusting them to honor their IOU's. Full stop. When a transaction ripples through several people, each of them is left holding some IOU's of the next person in line. Each person is responsible for honoring their own IOU's, independent of whatever else happens. If you refuse to honor your IOU until your friend honors his, that's reneging on the agreement.

In my opinion, the trust system in Ripple doesn't mesh well with most people's expectations about social credit.

Thanks for clarification, but unfortunately this doesn't completely solve my problem, the said brilliant kid could set his threshold reasonably high, with the belief that his elite friends are gonna borrow from other elites, who could be trusted to pay back, yet have not anticipated his poor friends to borrow from him en masse out of coincidence/some other reasons(e.g., I find out I could borrow from wealthy people, good! My friend as a guarantor? Double good!). And our assumption is that all entities act out of goodwill, we have not touched the possible scenario of abuse yet.




I did not mean that it's not a good idea that you go ahead and create it, I just doubt it would be successful, cause you will have to offer a competitive advantage over the current system of trust to make it successful, but I could hardly see any such advantage offered by Ripple from the information I have gathered.

There is very little difference between giving somebody trust and giving somebody money directly. As soon as you trust me, I can deposit your money at Bitstamp and leave you holding my IOU's. Don't extend trust to people without reason.

I'm starting to think that the language of Ripple needs revamping. People think that "trusting" people is a good thing, something you're supposed to do. It's not. Don't do it. It means something to the system, and "something" is "you can take my money".

Imagine having built up a small fortune in IOUs in ripple, assumedly you would have some pretty large trust limits to some other high profile entities.. If you were owed a lot by these other entities you would be forever paranoid that they might collapse.. always checking up on their operations.. and similarly, if they paid the debt to you and your large trust limit remains, you would also have to keep checking their reliability so there is no chance they borrow a crap load before bolting..

Sounds exhausting..

I don't get it. Why? I don't want to deal with that. I'd have a large trust limit with my gateway and small, throwaway trust limits with my friends. Part of the point of Ripple is that you can use the liquidity of the network to always receive IOU's you trust, like ones from a reputable gateway. And I'd withdraw from my gateway periodically to keep that balance from getting too large. No reason to lose everything if your gateway or the Ripple network goes down.

That's essentially why I believe a software should not try to be helpful here, it's a completely human issue, a person should always take any lending activities seriously, come to know the person and talk to him/her, especially if it's someone you don't personally know. In fact, try to assess the counterparty risk of some unknown entities is just what all those MIT Ph.D quants in the Wall Street have been trying to do for years yet completely screwed up, and you guys maybe bringing more variables into a already complex formula.

Without Ripple's convenience people have been unable to curb their urges to lend/borrow(or you could call it invest) irresponsibly, which creates the recession we are now in, I doubt with Ripple it could be even better. If an abuser screws up hugely and leaves the network with a huge web of debts, it seems to me hardly any new capital would risk to get into it again. Bitcoin on the other hand doesn't have to face such problems.

Remember as a startup you have to offer clear advantages over the established, if people should be left to figure out if you have anything clearly desirable, they most likely will choose to stay with the established.

Bitcoin has exactly the same problems. Bitcoin makes it easy to lend money to anonymous people over the internet, without access to any of the social or legal protections that come with transacting face-to-face. That's why this forum will shout "SCAM" at every shadow: they've been burned before.

First, Bitcoin is llike a cutting knife, it enables you to do many things, including killing, but I don't think anyone would say owning a cutting knife is problematic because it could be used to kill. While Ripple's IOU system is just like a gun, which is clearly designed and manufactured for one single purpose.

Second, I was talking about how Ripple's IOU network could possibly cripple due to abuses, which is probably not a problem bitcoin has to face, as it doesn't have to rely on anyone's trust to work.

You seem to miss the point that there is a cap on each link in the social trust network, or maybe I misunderstand you. Poor friend in India who makes 10$ per month? Cap trust at 5$. Elite friend who drives porshe? 10k. That way it would take a thousand poor friends back home to saturate your one link to the elite, an unrealistic scenario.

But still, I understand and agree with what you are saying. You, being responsible with your own money without even doing any actions after building a web of trust, sounds a little strange. After all, hawala, which this thing tries to be, besides trust also involves severe punishment if this trust is broken. A part that is completely missing from this protocol :)

Better said than I ever did, bro, this is essentially my view ATM. The concept is all fine and dandy, but in the real world people always tend to abuse such a system, you will find out the very trustworthy counterparty you are borrowing to is overleveraged to the brink of collapse, because, well, other people found him trustworthy as well. And Ripple is not helping here by trying to do what Wall Street has tried to do for years but failed: simplifying and evaluating the counterparty risk as a single number. I am not saying that the software creators should be responsible for these things, but I strongly dislike the philosophy that software should ever try to be helpful in the very complex human business of risk assessment, all the algorithms created by the quants are neutral after all.

As for the poor Indian friend: it's said somewhere in the Ripple webpages that in the old system banks only evaluate the risk with quantifiable terms like income, while disregarding important things for human like love and trust, etc, well in this spirit I guess I should not treat my poor and wealthy friends purely based on their financial conditions, otherwise why not just use banks as they are, at least theoretically, more professional in risk assessment?

I can verify Joe/MtGox, but I absolutely cannot thrust an anonymous friend of your friend.

Ripple is a system to transfer debt.

Trusting a friend for $20 on ripple is giving them a signed blank check that says "not to exceed $20" on it.

Now, your friend can't go into the grocery store and sign over a 3rd party personal check for groceries, it would be rejected. He can write his own iou/check for groceries however. The grocery store will come after your friend if the check bounces, not you.

Sounds like playing hot potato to me.

You aren't talking about ripple, though. You are not required to trust an anonymous friend of anyone else's friend. You aren't required to trust ANY anonymous friend. Heck, you aren't required to trust anyone. But if you do decide to trust people, you are only trusting those you immediately decide to trust - and sure, by proxy, you are including every single person in the ripple network, but the trust of the friend includes trust that that friend will also limit his/her liability in an intelligent way. If you don't know people who are trustworthy, then simply do not participate. But you do not have to trust an anonymous friend of a friend, and certainly trusting even an anonymous friend is a bad idea by most folks' standards.

Lowest hypothetical risk - Not using ripple at all, not trusting anyone
Medium hypothetical risk - trusting a very small amount of money with several close friends.
Highest hypothetical risk - trusting a very large amount of money with a bunch of random anons behind tor.

And people might say "Well I don't want to take ANY risk!" So why are you invested in Bitcoin? There is a risk with everything. So then we must ask what is the benefit. For the example given above - someone transfering their paycheck to BTC sending to egypt and converting to EGP - obviously ripple gives no benefit in that scenario, so the person who posted that obviously has performed a risk/benefit analysis and determined that he should probably not risk trusting any friends in Ripple as no benefit will come of it.
However, what if in a different scenario, someone is greatly benefited by Ripple and therefore it is worth the small risk of a small amount of $$ "risked" with a few closed friends to gain access to the network? So what if someone has gold and wants to transfer it to someone in Siberia who only accepts Canadian Tire money or whatever? Easier with Ripple than with Bitcoin. Ripple was expressly designed for transactions like that. Note that Ripple is hypothetically not the only option for transactions like this in the future - someone can easily frankenstein the concept and release it "the rite way" i.e. not premining coins, being dodgy about its purpose or XRP's role as a currency, etc etc etc. Basically not doing everything possible to make bitcoiners shout "scam" while also aggressively courting bitcoiners. What was up with that? It's like they can't decide whether they want to attract us or drive us away.

Just like frequent flier miles are handed out by an airline, prepaid minutes are owned by a phone company, or stamps are "pre-mined" by the post office. You're free to use it as currency, but keep in mind that they're basically just future transaction fees (the number of transactions one XRP pays for isn't 100% certain either, since it depends on load).
They are trying to make as much money as you're willing to pay for the convenience of using the system, while at the same time not killing it by over-pricing their services.
It's still in beta. It took many years before my PGP web of trust expanded to be useful enough that I could communicate securely without having to do a precursory key exchange. It was still something that I learned from and that I could write credit-giving essays and papers about.

Ripple's main challenge is to get a critical mass of gateways and IOUs going, as well as overcoming legal issues. The basic protocol itself appears sound, though there might be bugs hiding in the source code, so look forward to that getting released.

XRP shares some features with Bitcoin though, as well as other stocks and commodities, and one of those is that if you believe that Ripple is going up, feel free to invest, but that if public adoption fails, be prepared for a crash to near zero value.

Shameless self bump, I'm seeing it pop up in every discussion, meanwhile the FUD machine is in high gear, steering into a brick wall (end of beta)

How many Bitcoins have the ripplescam.org guys already payed?

Humbly I say I don't understand where you're coming from so I think I am missing the context.
ATM what confession do you belong to? Ripple haters or Ripple converts?

Speaking of walls: there is a huge one at 10 million XRP for 50 XRP/USD in the XRPUSD orderbook. BitStamp stopped selling away XRPs at that price around the time that wall was touched last Friday.
I believe the Ripple Masters (Jed & co) want the XRP price to stay there for a while. Either that or they have decided to collect 200k USD for OpenCoin's pocket expenses.

Also I noticed in Ripple that the XRPUSD volume and depth are growing faster than the XRPBTC ones.
Dunno if that's an application of the bigger fool theory. But yes the herd thinks of XRPs like another altcoin. IMHO because it is. And part of the mass doesn't care it's premined. Metaphorically speaking I bet it's those people that e.g. would choose dictatorship over democracy in exchange for a false sense of security. If it works for them and if Jed proves to be a benevolent dictator then happy days.

Methinks: since the spreads in XRPBTC are way larger than in XRPUSD, that is an opportunity for someone to write arbitrator bots and increase their BTC count or XRP count for free depending on which confession they choose to belong to.

XRP can't and won't compete with bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, that's just ridiculous if you know how it's made and what it is meant for. People are just using it to speculate with, which I think is stupid but whatever speculators will use anything nowadays to pump up and then dump for profit. Bitcoin is probably too stable right now for speculators so they look for something else. Ripple itself could complement Bitcoin, I don't see it as a threat at all.

I get a weird feeling in my gut that calling the organization opencoin and promising to open source/decentralize it increasingly with time was a way for some sinister force to manipulate big brains towards the dark side.

I hope it's just indigestion, though.

Haven't read though the comments so apologies if this is just repeating what anyone already said, however I think of ripples as a trojan horse in crytocurrency.

This isn't paranoia as far as I'm aware these are fact....

Ripples provides a method where people will hold IOUs representing bitcoins instead of bitcoins, whilst mistakenly assuming they are holding bitcoins. This sets a very dangerous precedent and is very similar to the way gold was replaced by paper representations of gold over the centuries.

The lie is that ripples will somehow help the bitcoin economy and work with it. This is not true, ripple will attempt to replace bitcoins with a fake mirage of bitcoins.

Ripple also provides a centralised controlled network for trading debt where the quantity of units in circulation representing that debt XRP can be inflated at the whim of the controllers. Does this sound familiar? This is the way debt based money currently operates already, and which bitcoins is fighting against.

Ripple is a trojan horse because it will attempt to control and kill the power of free money like bitcoins which will be able to hold value. Bitcoins are not debt, they are an asset you can hold which is nobodies liability.

Another huge warning sign is that Ripple claims to be 'open' misleading people to assume it is open source software, this is not the case. the software is not open at all. 

Avoid ripples, do not support this debt based system.

December 25th 2012...bravo ElectricMucus.  Prophesy fulfilled.  Big time!   ;D  Although I think we passed paranoid quite awhile ago.  Now it's just sheer terror, masked by half-truths and lies.   ;)

After going through this thread (and reading many of the other Ripple threads), something I get is this:

The pro Ripple people seem to get Ripple.
The BTC people don't seem to get Ripple.

Now, the second thing is alarming, because a lot of BTC people are very very computer literate if not IT guys. I am a bit alarmed at how Ripple is going to work with regular people in light of this. This point alone puts up my "Danger Danger" alarm and I think rightfully so. The burden of proof is on the Ripple guys and thus far I just don't see the proof.

I would say Ripple probably needs to make a lot of its functionality transparent to the end user. As of now it seems that isn't the case.

Personally, I don't like the sound of mixing "IOU's" with BTC. That just seems extremely dangerous and counterproductive.

I do see some of the point of Ripple but am not enamored by any of it at this time. A more simplified decentralized exchange seems to be in order. NOT controlled by a company.

Its about sharing.

Now that, is a sensible argument against Ripple.  /thumbsup

Aint nobody got time for Ripple

Apparently plenty.

The thing about paranoia is under it's influence you can't think straight, just compare the type of answers from the beginning of the thread to how they are now, I notice a big discrepancy.
If I am right there will be an XRP bubble / BTC crunch next, it was the same thing with LTC... ironically fuelled by the paranoia.

I'm not paranoid, everyone just thinks I am  ;D

I expect a XRP bubble although not so dramatic. The OpenCoin crowd has the power to slow down growth by means of huge walls. Although the risk is that their own greed prevents them from doing so and they end up killing their own toy (but hopefully not the fresh ideas that it brought on the table).

I do not expect XRP to have the power to crunch BTC though. Because BTC is the MP3 of cryptocurrencies.

After the silent exodus from Gox, I see that the other exchanges' volume and prices are on a steady rise and I think this is a damn good sign for BTC. If BTC price stays stable for a while I think that all we need is infrastructure - like exchanges that are able to issue commonly accepted debit cards denominated in BTC with instant conversion at non-extortion fees. Then we're back on our route to dismissing fiat.

Yes I don't think XRP will do anything to "crush" BTC. It's even more different and has different kind of people willing to invest in it.

But thats also the thing the people who feel threatened by it don't get. I don't really know how much it will really affect BTC, but from how things look now it's worse than before LTC took off.
I agree on gox also, although not short term, since the exactly kind of thinking process makes somebody think we "need" gox to maintain a good price, don't ask me for the rationale on this it's mainly irrational - anything changing the status quo is potential bad news for those guys.

XRP potential to crush bitcoin would be very hard to understand unless you know, for example why the price of gold and silver has been crushed during a period where all the main fiat currencies are increasing their  quantity of money through quantitative easing. Its too complex to go into much detail here but essentially, many people who don't hold gold think they do when all they really have is an IOU.

The war between using debt as money and using commodity type monetary assests, things that hold value, has gone on probably for centuries. You cant compare Litecoin with Ripples, Litecoin is real money fixed in quantity, potentially good as a store of value just like bitcoins.

It is the power to create money that allows central banks to steal wealth through inflation, just as XRP quantity can be inflated by the Opencoin controllers, this gives Opencoin the power to steal wealth through inflation. The temptation will be too much to resist. Money power preys on weak willed greed, its only human. Debt is a way to enslave. Ripple is a way to replace bitcoins with debt

Ripple shouldn't be getting the traction that it's getting.
This is a classic example of greed supporting a scam.

XRP is not debt. Once Ripple leaves OpenCoin's control, they will not have the ability to change the number of XRP in the system. They may still own a large portion of the XRP, which will give them significant leverage on the price if they choose to use it, but this is very different from having an unlimited ability to print money. For example, you know at any moment what fraction of the XRP you control, and that fraction can never be diluted without your permission.

It's not debt which you ought to be concerned about but compounding interest on debt. Debt is only natural and it will not go away as currency will not go away.

This is a very interesting thread.

The key learning I think I got from reading this is that the term "Trust" when used in ripple might have beena bad choice, instead one should think of it as "Line-of-Credit", anytime you grant trust to somebody it is like handing them a credit card linked to your bank account.

The proper use of Ripple, to avoid being scammed, is to have Trust to only one gateway, one which you actually trust to redeem the IOUs you receive. That way there is no way for debt to be rippled through your account. Only trust more than one gateway after you are confortable with the system and you know how rippling works.

The benefit in the Ripple system over just using bitcoins directly can be seen in trying to receive and send small transactions quickly. The bitcoin protocol requires fees for unaged coins, while ripple allows funds to be sent immediately after they are received.

Not really.
You just have to base your trust on rational thinking rather than greed. Some folks are confused on what trust means.

Hint: You ought not to trust all your funds not even cumulative.

You should definitely only "trust" entities which you actually trust to honor their IOUs, but additionally trusting only one entity per currency is probably a good idea. Trusting more than one increases default risk substantially, because if either defaults, you probably lose all of your money.

You can lose all your money, but no one defaults on Ripple!  :)

Did you read the hint part too?
Another hint: The quotes do not apply

Debt is natural but using it as money isn't. Loans should be made from accumulated capital not credit conjured out of thin air. Creditors should accept the risk of losing their bad loans not getting bailed out.

I'm curious who the investors are behind ripple? I know of google are funding opencoin, but who else? Is it the banks?

OpenCoin lol...is the most contradictory use of the word Open I have ever heard.


LOLz talk about misleading eh?

The name itself...lol

For the record, anyone who thinks Ripple is a serious threat to bitcoin is off their rocker. IM not so Humble O. But lack of a threat doesn't mean I can't make fun of it. 



Shh, we're supposed to ignore that part, and *trust* that they will one day become open source and decentralized  8)

I know that I'm off my rocker! Perhaps ripple isn't a serious threat to bitcoins, I can hope anyway. It looks like there is so much wrong with it that it will commit suicide without any help. I'm worried about the trend it is setting though. If ripple doesn't work, banks will be back and keep pushing variations of these sort of schemes, and the mainstream media will push it to the masses of braindead sheeple, once mass adoption happens then we're stuck with it.

It analogous to the way the first two versions of a central bank in the USA were defeated. The bankers didn't give up and got their federal reserve, 3rd time lucky. And now lucky us, we have inherited a world where debt is our money and is backed by nothing tangible.

Its a blatent attempt to deceive
 >:(

Bitcoin Bridge implemented on Ripple (https://ripple.com/blog/bitcoin-bridge-lets-ripple-users-make-payments-to-bitcoin-accounts/)

Thoughts? I was wondering when they'd implement this. If Ripple takes off, this would open up many new avenues to acquire BTC. It would also allow bitcoin merchants to serve the entire Ripple user base.

 :)

''You don’t even need to own or use Bitcoins to make payments in Bitcoins.''

Where do those bitcoins come from? Are they created out of thin air?

A gateway won't send out real BTC unless someone sends a trusted (liquid) currency in exchange. They aren't created out of thin air anymore than your BTC held on exchanges are.

No, you atomically buy the right to those Bitcoins as part of the payment process. Someone has to have them to sell to you and you have to have something they're willing to trade for them.

Bump.

You guys are ripe, about as paranoid as a schizophrenic in police custody.

What is ripple?

Why I would go to a gateway,
to give them my money,
my dirty fiat money,
for them to change to ripples,
to send around the network,
trusting all the network,
to send along some bitcoins,
or promise of some bitcoins,
to redeem against the gateway,
the one that has my money,
(and sent around those ripples)
in order for the gateway,
to give me lovely bitcoins
when I could get my bitcoins
(Satoshi's lovely bitcoins)
directly from the gateway
for my dirty fiat money -
why would I?

I wouldn't  ;D

To be honest the very title of this thread gives a big clue of its trolling intent.

The way I see it, with Ripples you have to have a heck of a lot of trust that people will do the right thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to, the network takes care of all that, its built in.

Ripple is now officially open source.   ;D

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=301635.0

Because if bitcoins are cheaper at a different gateway, you can move your fiat around quickly and freely. Haven't you seen how different the prices are lately?



You have to trust an exchange if you're going to trade bitcoins. Its no different with ripple, except its called a gateway, and once you get your IOUs you're free to send and trade them just like bitcoins. Looking at the current state of mtgox and bitstamp prices, that is something the ecosystem really could use: a method other than bank and wire transfers for moving around fiat IOUs.

But Fiat Gateway Ripple IOUs will not all be equal.
If I were the GreatCloudBitcoinExchange.com I would value Ripple IOUs from German or Canadian Gateways, for example, much higher than USA gateways. This would have to be passed on somehow to those using the USA Gateway, hence the whole Ripple network has done nothing to prevent the difference in pricing and risk when using exchanges in different countries and with different companies.
For any other transaction the local gateway could still use bitcoin, where no trust is required, to move funds across the world to another company.

I don't understand how producing more debt that requires more trust and will require just as much regulation and information sharing does anything that the Dirty Legacy Fiat system doesn't do already.

And those collecting debt will still need baseball bats, guns etc to collect.

The beauty of Satoshi's bitcoins is it enables global transactions WITHOUT the need for debt or trust, freeing the masses from the Legacy Banking system so they individuals can concentrate on generating real meaningful wealth, not simulated fake banking profits supported by inflation and our future poverty.

How does one become paranoid about something they are ignorant of and have no interest in?

That was my point.

They aren't uninterested in it, to the contrary. The irony is that they realize the potential of the concept, it is just that they are so much into the Bitcoin Cult that they can't accept the conclusion.
They will attack anything that isn't directly leading to capital gains of their investment, no matter how innovative.

I see. You're in your 'lazy' period again. Probably no point then to attempt to convince you that, just maybe, if one of us bitcoincargocultists (which we are, admittedly) says he thinks the bitcoin protocol is worlds apart from Ripple on conceptual grounds he could, you know, mean it. Don't forget, if you would take that answer at face value, you could accuse them of being tinfoily Internet libertards. That's fun as well :D

Of course it's different, Ripple has a cooperate entity behind it (opencoin, now ripplelabs) Bitcoin has a non-profit organization behind it (Bitcoin Foundation). Bitcoin is grass-roots, Ripple is old guard.
Have you seen anybody criticizing ripple that way? I haven't, and I think I know why: Preaching free market capitalism and criticizing for profit cooperations using FOSS for their purposes does make you look like a hypocrite.

FYI, my signature isn't really my opinion, (that's why it is in quotes), it's meant as a ridicule of people who suggest I have been paid by TPTB to troll here. It seems to be working btw.

Didn't have your sig in mind... guess I'm just personally appaled by the more Rayndian mindset some in here seem to have.

Anyway, you're partly right. Most criticism towards (c)ripple (ooh, that's a smart one) isn't based on principles, but on, well, greed I guess. Just pointing out it's not only greed that can make you reject it. I like to think that I'm in this thing for roughly equal portions of idealism and greed. Maybe delusional.

More like rippe.

That's right, different gateway IOUs will be valued differently to different people in different places. That's why the prices will vary on the ripple order books. The most trusted gateways will have the most valuable IOUs.

If funds can only be moved across the world using bitcoins, then we are the mercy of exchanges (you STILL have to trust an exchange). What if you are in a place where the exchange has funky prices? Or is taking forever to process your fund withdrawal? Ripple brings more exchanges on board, and it gives people the power to do what they like with exchange IOUs.



Because it decentralizes IOUs. With ripple, exchanges can't seize IOUs because now IOUs are crypto-coins. The same power that decentralization gives to bitcoins, ripple gives to exchange deposits.



And what happens if an exchange seizes your bitcoin deposit or fiat funds? The same scenario exists in the current world, you would have to go after them with some sternly-worded e-mails to get them to release your funds (and funds are just a deposit aka debt). The world where bitcoins are useful without debt or trust is a straw-man world. Try to trade bitcoins over the internet without trusting an exchange. Ripple just makes that trust explicit (that's a good thing).

Ripple will do great things for bitcoin - its a tool for trading them which puts bank and wire transfers to shame. It is true that bitcoin alone is theoretically capable of completely replacing bank and wire transfers. But that is a theory which is far-off in the future, the Legacy Banking system is still here and it is powerful. Ripple is here now (its not just a proposal), and it gives power to the users (again, on ripple you control your IOUs). It is not perfect, but it is a leap of a stepping-stone to a much better world.

Ripple will be subject to all the same rules as any money transmitter or lender in individual countries.
I fail to see how it will be any different from legacy banking.
Why would I want to trust a Ripple gateway AND an exchange with my dirty fiat money, when I could go directly to an exchange OR buy bitcoins locally?
No self respecting legacy fiat loving government are going to let private citizens start issuing debt. They reserve that right for them and their buddies.

True, but the big advantage is that the sender and receiver don't have to do business with the same money transmitter, so freedom of choice is much greater.

One big difference is that people can exchange balances without having to go to or through the issuer. Another is that cross-currency payments can have direct access to market makers with no intermediary where anyone can make markets on a level playing field, fully in the open.

You don't have to trust an exchange because all transactions are atomic. You do have to trust a gateway, at least while funds are "in flight".

There are people who thought Bitcoin would be shut down too for all kinds of reasons too. The problem for governments is that they can't both prohibit something and regulate it.

They were called opencoin when they were closed source, now that theyre open source they're called ripplelabs   ??? What are ripples anyway? Who wants to use premined coins ?

faster tx, send currencies like USD, EUR etc.

although it may not be the best way, it could work.

exactly -- instant transactions and ability to hold/transact in many, many different currencies could be really useful, enough so to be widely adopted. it just isn't widely adopted right now.

With Ripple & ZipZap integration being a fact with the recent version of the client, there is now an alternative for buying btc's with cash (probably more convenient). You can now deposit cash in one of the 700.000 locations and buy BTC's, convert, transfer, whatever you wishwithin the client...  

I had 70,000 Ripple sitting in a wallet from the giveaway early last year and sold them some time ago on btc38.com for Yuan which was worth over $2k at the time.

The key difference between Bitcoin and Ripple is that governments will regulate the issuers of Ripple IOUs as money transmitters particularly if these issuers get large enough so that their IOU's are widely trusted. With Bitcoin there in no one to regulate in this category since Bitcoin is equity based.

To this very day, I am using Prosper and making about 12%.  It's hardly a failure.  You either gave up too early or are repeating inaccurate information.

Ripple gateways have their incentives aligned to work perfectly, until the point of a catastrophic credit crunch.
Alas I have stated elsewhere, gateways are incentivised to hide and cover their bad loans from the network at all costs, as otherwise their ious will become less valuable.
This will lead eventually lead to a credit crunch.
It will have happened by 2020 if ripple survives that long.

Or they have an incentive not to have bad loans at all....
I guess we have to wait, see you in 16 years. Good luck hoping Bitcoin is even around by then.

Just so you guys get a hint on what's happing the ripple labs team does now 50% of world community grid crunching

They would if boinc were competitive instead of cooperative. Bitcoiners often brag that mining is the largest distributed computing project on earth, but besides lining the pockets of the participants it does very little good. WCG on the other hand contributes to finding cures for diseases,  research into clean energy and so on...

and how are they doing this?

They pay everybody who participates a fraction of 1,250,000 xrp every day, which essentially becomes "mining" for xrp.

What is with the Ripple fanboys and their relentless need to post about Ripple all over the bitcoin forums.  It's almost like they are trying to pump up the value of XRP. 

I remember this rhetoric before Litecoin became big, and those who used it are now too butthurt to even post on the forums....

The ignore button is a useful feature.

If you are posting in a thread created by somebody you are committed to ignore you are doing it wrong.

Understanding Bitcoin compared to this is a total doss. I've read plenty about Ripple and still don't have much of a clue.

Perhaps in the future people will use it without knowing but it's of zero interest to me and it would give the average person a stroke if they attempted to master it. May whoever does throw some money at it profit nicely.

tl;dr how do I mine nipples and is it worth it?

Hopefully you will only ever have two nipples! The wcg giveaway (http://www.computingforgood.org) can be discussed  here (https://ripple.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=18)

I'm willing to gamble that any system that allows people's money to be taken away without their consent or knowledge will never become big. 

You could've just said 'you can't' and 'no' instead of sending me off to some forum full of people moaning about how shit their returns are

Gladly that's not ripple.


once you are finished gloating get ready for the inevitable collapse of hubris

It's not that complicated rally if you already understand how Bitcoin works. Some of the biggest ripple boons are Bitcoiners, at least the ones not into making a cult out of it.

Why does ripple keep popping up here? is there not a ripple forum somewhere else on the internet? This is bitcoins. I've listened to the ripple arguments why its so good and I'm not interested.

IDK, this is kind of the point of this thread, although it gets derailed constantly.
I don't mind, since that strengthens my point.

Not interested != Paranoid.

This is a bitcoins speculation forum. What the f*ck has ripples got to do with anything. Thats not paranoia it boredom if anything. I'd rather talk about other alt coins if I must divert from bitcoins. Peercoins are interesting

You're showing by far not the typical response, if all there would be to it I wouldn't have seen any reason to create this thread in the first place.

Do you know how many times i've heard ripples mentioned in mainstream media? zero.

Its just not interesting

me neither, but then why are you still posting? :D

Believe me.  Its interesting.  Its just too difficult to grasp.  You think Bitcoin is hard?  Try getting a grip on Ripple.  Or rather .... try getting grandma to get a grip on Ripple.  If I am understanding it correctly, whereas Bitcoin can send bitcoin anywhere in the world, instantly, free of charge .... Ripple can send *any currency* anywhere in the world, free of charge - and convert from any currency to any other currency in the process, free of charge (or for the cost of an XRP, which is 2 cents right now).  Ripple can also do conversions between Bitcoin and all alt coins.  So one might say that Ripple is Bitcoin on a mega dose of steroids.  But grasping and using the system is currently too difficult for the average person. 

And I believe Ripple markets itself as ultimately being the invisible backbone to the banking system.   I don't believe its intended to be B2C but B2B and as such, you aren't going to see "Joes coffee shop now accepting Ripple".  The question is whether the Ripple people are going to pour the millions of dollars necessary into (1) simplifying the system and (2) selling it to the world economy.   Because believe me, what it does, is new, interesting, and extremely needed.

http://ripplescam.org/

And yet you explain nothing of how it works.

TradeFortress's lies. And quite ironic, considering that he should know a thing or two about centralized vs decentralized, due to his first-hand experience losing/stealing 4,000+ BTC from users of his inputs.io wallet service.



It has bid/ask offers and trade matching built into the protocol - so its "decentralized exchange". Instead of a new "block" every few minutes, there's a new "ledger" every few seconds. So whereas blocks in a blockchain only keep track of how much coin is at each address, the ripple ledger also keeps track of bid/ask trade offers.

Now, in order to trade on ripple, you still have to trust an "issuer" aka gateway. But that's no different than any other way you can currently trade bitcoins - by depositing bitcoin at an exchange, you implicitly trust that exchange (the exchange could disappear overnight and steal your deposited funds).

There's another thread where people are trying out ripple - someone created one quadrillion FUNcoins and is giving them out, just for learning purposes:
Start using Ripple, learn with no risk. The FunCoin Gateway (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=411459.0)

Another reason to become paranoid about Ripple :): it debuted on “TV’s No. 1 New Show” – NBC’s The Blacklist.

Here is the video, Ripple is visible @1:23 and 1:30
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x19n27t_blacklist-mentions-ripple-and-bitcoin_lifestyle

And this is how it looks like:

https://ripple.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screen-Shot-2014-01-14-at-10.23.25-AM1.png

I believe Ripple has some big boys behind it and more....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKIJ9ekfAZY

Watch and see.... ;)

CooterCoin

Yeah I have become interested in ripple. I mean I'd rank ripple ahead of all the alt-coins in terms of utility. Community issued money is getting a revival apparently. Ripple seems like an electronic and extremely cheap way for communities to issue and use their own currency and develop closed loop economies. But why have we not seen any cool developments with Ripple? 

I think I can explain it, let me give it a shot.

A centralized network is susceptible to attack. A decentralized network is resistant to attack.

A centralized con-artist is susceptible to attack. A decentralized con-artist network.......


Or maybe I just don't understand it. Anything is possible, but this system seems to rely on trust, which is the primary currency in a confidence game.

Every human monetary or financial system relies either on trust, on force, or on a mix. One can list several things one must trust to use Bitcoin, for example, that a super-majority of Bitcoin users won't decide to change the Bitcoin software such that your Bitcoins are no longer considered valid or that 51% of the mining power isn't already controlled by the same malicious entity.

Ironically the only way to ensure that Bitcoin miners are not secretly colluding and you don't need to trust them is by having >50% of the global hash rate yourself, thus forcing others to trust you...

...can only scam those who chose to "invest" into a dishonest scheme. Pirateat40s ponzi scam did not impact Bitcoin itself at all (and would have been far more evident in Ripple by the way) even though at some points his claimed balance must have been in the hundred thousands or did have any implications on user balances at e.g. MtGox. TradeFortress showed that you can scam people on Ripple (by scamming them... an interesting "proof of concept"), wrote ripplescam.org after that and proceeded to scam the users of his own webwallet services out of some undisclosed amount of BTC. Still this did not have an effect on anyone NOT using his "services" or falling for his scams or on Bitcoin (the system) itself.

I see Ripple as a front-runner in digital currencies.  They have partnered with Zipzap, so you can now deposit cash into your ripple account.  They also have their own altcoins (Geckos [GKO] and NoFiatCoin [XNF]).  Last time I checked, 1 GKO was selling for 7 XRP and 1 XNF was 100 XRP on their exchanges.

Good lord, not only do we have a flood of copy-paste Bitcoin based coins, and the new Java software based coins, now we have coins that are simply made up ripple assets.. at least the copy and pasters had to do a little work.. how long does it take to create a ripple asset, all of about 10 seconds..

This is a feature in many respects.

Is there a list of sites accepting XRP floating about anywhere?

Ripple has done nothing but plummet the last few months. There is zero reason this coin is worth 2 billion and i am glad it was put back on Crypto market cap because it will accelerate the mass exodus from a coin that is going nowhere.

The number 1 reason this type of coin and NXT and QRK and any other coin will ultimately fail is because you cannot buy adoption, a community, an economy. You cannot purchase or acquire in any way the ecosystem that will make the coin actually worth more than zero.

Mined coins are ingenious because the ecosystem is organic, the ecosystem is first created by the miner and then others eventually join in to make a community.

Very similar to the gold mining era in the USA, huge communities would blossom overnight to support mining towns. The connected infrastructure created San Francisco.

However, you cannot buy a few hundred people put them in a town and wave your hands dramatically and say come here, come here, buy my gold!!

Everyone will laugh at you.

Ripple != XRP, the price is still quite stable in USD terms (though falling slowly there as well).
Actually it has been falling for a bit less than 2 months, if you got in before that, you have a ~100% or more profit still.

You can transparently use XRP at current market rates to pay at any place that accepts Bitcoins for example.

Ripple has lost 30% in the last couple months, and will continue to bomb out

I actually tried using Ripple and I failed. The markets and uses for Ripple are abysmal because nobody cares.

Dear God, why are their so many skeptics about DOGE at this point.

Much network hash rate - miners
Such youth adoption - turning BTC into Blackberry?
Very Volume!!!! - much investment

What will be beyond funny is watching DOGE go ballistic in the next six months while LTC and BTC mope around and decide what they are going to do.

No.  BTC is first coin and winner coin.  All other coins is JOKES but doge honest about JOKE.  So DOGE take market cap from alts:

V FAST, MUCH CONFIRMS

Bitcoin = 10 min  ->  Litcoin = 2.5 min   ->  Dogecoin = 1 min

SO COINS, V RICH

Bitcoin = 21,000,000 BTC  ->  Litcoin = 84,000,000 LTC   ->  Dogecoin = 100,000,000,000 DOGE

SUCH COMMUNITY

r/Bitcoin = 954 online now   ->   r/Litecoin = 130 online now   ->   r/Dogecoin = 823 online now

doge-dice.com (trusted dooglus), doge-road (such highz), doge-tip bot (so generous)

LITECOIN SO SATURATE, DOGECOIN TO MOON

+1

subreddit for DOGE is slightly below BTC!!! WTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Uhhh i just checked r/dogecoin has 4800+ online right now

r/bitcoin has only 1300.....

four times the subreddit interest in two months....... and in six months...... and in one year.....

much excitement

I still dont know what ripple is.  Still havnt panic sold for ripple.

What am I doing wrong EM?

Also Active Users:

/r/Bitcoin = 1,206 users here now
/r/dogecoin = 374

What flavor of the week should I be afraid of today bears?

It's a platform for issuing, redeeming, holding, transferring, and trading arbitrary assets.

BTC does all of this while being decentralized right?

No. Bitcoin allows you to hold and transfer BTC, but that's it. (Unless you build things like colored coins on top of it.)

Update: I guess it sort of issues it too.

The issuing part of Bitcoin is a bit tricky though and hard to compare to Ripple, since it is not for arbitrary amounts and made difficult via PoW.

the ripple concept is a good idea, but Ripple the company sucks.  Google Wallet, Facebook Wallet, and iWallet will all be building their own versions of Ripple.

As I understand it colored coins are just another protocol on top of BTC.  It doesn't add centralization.  So if colored coins can do it, BTC can do it.

Well, the thing is: they maybe can - Ripple definitely can, as it is existing and live for ~1.5 years now.

It is under an ISC license, they even just need to fork everything. Paying someone to do that for one afternoon however probably already costs more than the XRP they'd need in their whole lifetime to use the existing Ripple network. I don't really see the appeal of forking off (which is stronger for pure "digital asset" systems like Bitcoin, which has been forked hundreds of times by now) but we'll see what the future brings.

control and risk.