Bitcoin Forum

My take on a Ripple opinion poll.

I think you should change the subject to something more meaningful, like "[POLL] what do you think of ripple"

What I think of ripple?

It's going to kill the banks unless the banks manage to kill ripple first.

For me ripple is an implementation of an infrastructure that can be used for Free Banking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_banking) and also for "personal banking". It's also ideal for running community/local currencies.

All in all an awesome idea and hopefully impelmented on strong secure crypto and ideas (consesus model).

JoeKatz might even be right, it might change the way we think about money... this would be a long process however and bitcoin will become the #1 money before this happens.

When you think about it: why are we using scarce commodities as sound money? Isn't that kind-of unfair and/or unflexible (I know, I sound like a fucking keynesian now). Anyhow: both bitcoin (sound commodity money) and ripple (p2p flexible-supply currency) beat the current fiat regime on all accounts I can think of (except the ones involving force).

I'm definitely going to stick with bitcoin and I'm going to give ripple a long, hard and dedicated evaluation.

I think it could be even better than that.  As I wrote on IRC, this is the closest thing from a decentralised banking system I've ever seen.

well, if it weren't for the fed and "the banking cartel" + the govt' of the world, the current banking system would already be decentralized, no?

I think we can agree that ripple has the potential to free the banking system from central control. It can potentially make obsolete all currently existing fiat currencies and maybe even the commodity money (haven't made up my mind about that one).


the bolded part is what ripple (and also bitcoin) are about imo... "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it"... so maybe we could also be asking "why ripple" instead of "what is ripple".

btw: what about privacy regarding ripple?

Yes, we can agree on that.


This is indeed a big question mark.   I would say that when the FED reserve gave up on the gold convertibility in 1971, the price of gold did not collapse.   So I guess a commodity money such as bitcoin will still make sense.  I will stick to it for long and medium term savings, anyway.

yup, what I've been saying all along. Money is just information.

Scarce commodities, even Bitcoin, don't solve the problem of shortages in money supply like in this parable: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/286017/euro-parable-john-derbyshire

The German tourist's 100 EUR were temporary extension of money supply. That's why we have business cycle policies. Keynes et al just didn't understand that credit has to be created by the people, bottom up, rather than top-down by a central bank.

mach kein Fass auf, digger ;)

I don't believe myself currently that "shortages in money supply" can be problematic. Further I hold the opinion that Keynes (or whatever group) just came up with that theory to funnel power towards the state and/or banking cartel.

I'm still an opponent of "managed money supply". This might be changing currently: My greatest criticism of a managed money supply is that it puts too much power in the hands of too few people. Clearly it's possible with ripple for that to be not the case (as you say "credit created by the people"). So I might differentiate my view here.

This is the only correct and economically sound approach.

Money is just a measure of value. Just like meter is the measure of length and kilogram is the measure of weight! What is the point of "managing" the length of a meter or the weight of a kilogram? The only reason of doing that is for your personal gain to convince other people that something is longer/shorter or heavier/lighter than it is. Unless you believe that the so called "noble lie" is something good?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie


No.

Money, as already said, is a measure of value. You must have a standard for the measure. The result of the measurement process is the information. The tool you measure with is not just information. It must be a part of the objective reality around us.

Yes, that's why credit is useful even in a economy with a commodity-based money.  And that's why Ripple and Bitcoin can work together.   But a credit has to be a promise to pay something at some point, something that is not a credit.  Otherwise the whole thing does not make sense. 

no, that's a denomination then, a certain currency if you will, which may or may not fulfill your requirement for a stable, "objective standard". Which standard anyway? There could be several standards. A gold standard, an oil standard, a basket of commodities standard, etc...

That I contributed to society with 1 hour of programming is information. Now I need to store this information in some way that society agrees that I can redeem equivalent value from that society in the future. That's the problem that money is trying to solve. That we use gold, euros, dollars, bitcoins or whatever is just the current state of the available technology, toolset and the prevalent mindset in society.

No.  It's not the actual nature of the the work that is stored in money, it's its value.

Your hour of programming was exchanged against something, usually a salary.  Those two things are thus considered, at least temporarily, of equal value.   Exchange defines an equivalence relation.   Now, an hour of programming from a better programmer would have been paid better.   This defines an order relation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_relation).  Equivalence and order relations are the basis of the concept of quantity.

So in a nutshell, money quantifies the value of exchanged goods and services.  That's why as a tool for measuring quantities, a fixed amount makes sense.

Anyway, I think this project is awesome because at some point, all markets could work with such a system.   Imagine the bond and stock market being democratized like this.

not so fast. Salary of what? I'm not there yet in my example.


that's not what money is. That's what money does.

I'm not sure I see where you want to go here.  My point anyway was that to me money must have a fixed total amount, otherwise it does not make much sense.

If I receive a note of 10 XXX and I have no idea how many XXX there is in total then this 10 number means really nothing.  There could as well have been written "blue" on it, it would have meant the same.

What money does is what matters.  Like inches and centimeters.  They are two different units of measures, but they do the same thing, measuring lengths.   Now if some people want to use an elastic to measure lengths, they can, but to me it's silly.

the value of stuff is subjective. That's why we can exchange something voluntarily while everyone thinks he made a good deal.

There are at least two meanings in the word value:  there is the "numerical" value, which I was referring to, and there is the "exchange" value, which indeed is subjective.

Only 37 votes.  Come on guys;

Where is the option for criticism unrelated to the IOU stuff?  On the premine, on the currently closed server software, on the 'consensus' model?

It's tough and tedious to put all possibilities in one poll.  I tried to put just the main lines.

Edit:  added a "this poll sucks" answer.

Voted "this poll sucks" for this reason.

Ripple is not really a currency on its own. It's a system to transmit money and debts, denominated in other currencies. And it could involve force, since IOUs can be enforced through social pressure. Ripple IOUs are backed by fiat and friendship, while XRP are valued because they're required for transaction fees. Bitcoin are backed by their own scarcity, but have no utility; unless you distributed BTC to every person on Earth equally in the beginning, there will always be some who have nothing to gain by joining the Bitcoin economy, and this 99.999999% of the world probably never will accept a Bitcoin payment because any technical benefit would be negated by the hoarding.

Everyone knows somebody though, so even native tribes without currency could use Ripple if one of them has the Internet and a way to recharge his phone.

If XRP hoarding is allowed to take place, it would kill Ripple.

Not only do XRPs function as a currency (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146964.0) but they are superior to Bitcoins in some ways. Have a look at the BitStamp order book. XRPs trade against Bitcoins and fiat. How is this not a currency?


Right, and Ripple was designed from the ground up to give the founders a hoard of 100 billion XRP.

To fulfill the role they are meant for, XRP must be a bond rather than a currency!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=146059.msg1557671#msg1557671

It's not a currency because it's not current money - it's a commodity or at best a futures instrument for paying for Ripple fees. And that's what gives it more value than a Bitcoin - XRP actually gives you a Ripple account and some transactions. Think of it akin to Diablo 3 gold or ISK - it gives you play time in a system.
I'm fine with the founders having XRP to spread around to facilitate the growth of the system, as long as they do it for the benefit of the system as a whole. In other words they have a responsibility to set monetary policy.

I would not be fine with it if they were claiming that they deserved that hoard for owning graphics cards that could waste electricity to do needless busywork, and that they'd only part with it if you gave them millions of dollars for it.

Besides, XRP is just - as I said above - meant to pay for service fees. It's not supposed to replace other currencies, or Bitcoin, as the denomination of a Ripple IOU.

>> (XRP is) meant to pay for service fees. It's not supposed to replace other currencies, or Bitcoin, as the denomination of a Ripple IOU.

Yet they are hording it for themselves and systematically bribing community members on this forum. 

prime example of a shill below:

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2013/02/vpn-accepts-ripple-the-first-true-bitcoin-competitor/



 

Yes, my understanding is that developing XRP into a more or less functional currency is a monetization strategy of OpenCoin founders. They have very little choice in this respect, some sort of "pre-mining" is the only viable monetization strategy for distributed platform such as Bitcoin or (potentially) distributed platform such as Ripple.

Bitcoin-based premined altcoins tried this strategy and failed, but they did not bring any essential value to cryptocurrency ecosystem to justify pre-mined bonanza for their founders.

Ripple, on the other hand, has the promise of creating fully decentralized exchange ecosystem as well as decentralized instant payment framework. Thus solving two main problems of Bitcoin community: dependency on fiat exchanges and blockchain bloat. So, they may yet succeed where others utterly failed.

Can you add a voting choice that "Ripple is MTGOX and I ain't about to get Ripple Goxxxed".  :)

I'm finally getting my head wrapped around this entire Bitcoin thing, and along comes Ripple. Hmmmmm . . . More to learn. I can't stop.

-1 A shill is in the eye of the beholder. If you had showed up in the B world 2 years earlier, you would have seen a handful of "miners" worldwide, "hoarding" Bitcoin by mining it on CPU's, at practically zero difficulty. That hoard they are now selling to the likes of you at 1000's % profit.  ;D

"They" were and still are "systematically bribing" merchants and institutions into accepting Bitcoin through unsolicited donations and 10000Btc-pizza stunts.  ::)

I criticized jed back then for the way he ran MtGox, and the POS it was then. However, i respect him for seeing that mining was wasteful, exclusive and ultimately centralizing, because fewer and fewer people in the world have the capital necessary to "hoard" B by running mining operations...

Perhaps, it's by coincidence, but i think it was also insightful of him to unload MtG as a vestige of the old, centralized, wall-street xchange model, and begin working on ACTUALLY implementing a p2p, minerless, unified platform, which we had often discussed here as "the future", but no one had enough ass to make reality.

No initial currency distribution method would have been acceptable to everyone. However, before you start flaming with the above, you should read at least some of the history recorded in this forum about sub-50-cent Bitcoin days, and reflect on the fact that no one forced you into Bitcoin, and no one is forcing you into Ripple, and that both will stand or fall on their own merit regardless of what their proponents do.   :)

Much the way that the magnitude of the quantity of integers differs from the magnitude of the quantity of real numbers (Continuum Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_hypothesis)), the distribution of Ripple through OpenCoin's centralized authority is uncountably infinitely many more times distasteful than Bitcoin's countably infinite, but decentralized distribution through hashing power.

tl;dr (for math challenged): Ripple's premine of 100b XRP is infinitely more distasteful.

That's not what the Continuum Hypothesis says.

i heard its a scam but idk

It's not a "scam". There are some legitimate, potentially serious criticisms of the way the project has been managed so far, but anyone calling it a scam is being hyperbolic to the point of being deceptive. It may turn out to be one in the future, but so far they have been nothing but forthcoming about details of the project and have given (debatable) justifications for virtually every one of those details. Whether this is a project the Bitcoin community wants to support is an open question, however.

It's hard to believe that i find myself debating in jed's defense.  :D You keep saying "premine" as an intentional falsehood, because you know that Ripple is not based on mining, but you wish to present it as one of the B clones that did premine.

In fact, if we look back, we see that jed's intention was to completely eliminate mining from his project (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10193.msg146250#msg146250).

Ripple is not a new idea, and long predates Bitcoin. Merging it with B in various ways has been discussed here many times. You seem to be an accomplished developer, and a MisterBig at that!  ;)

You and any other mister big had plenty of time to contact Ryan Fugger, who also had input on how p2p Ripple would be implemented, and do a mining-based Ripple, or join jed's effort and try to shape it.

Once the ripplers release their code, you will be free to be the first ripple clone to fork it, and let the masses decide what's better.

Instead, you decided to arm-chair quarterback jed's project and try to shape it after the release by trying to smear it for real reasons that only you know for sure, which i think is "infinitely more distasteful."

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement:

"The OpenCoin business model is to hold XRP and hope they gain value."

No kidding. As soon as we all figure out ripple, 'quantum physics coin' will be unveiled.

Isn't that the business model for any commercial activity?  You make something and you hope people will want to buy it?

If that is their entire model, they're likely to fail. However, they might not fail if
"The OpenCoin business model is to sell XRP to stimulate the growth of and smooth functioning of Ripple, and to give away XRP to Bitcoiners as one of several ways of marketing the system."

I accept the OpenCoin business model as THEIR business model, which the world has the option to accept or reject.  It's not being forced on us the way the USD business model is.

Grondilu is right: it's the same business model of Bitcoin, any stock, your grandma's antique collection, and so on.

My point is that reasonable people can disagree on the initial currency distribution method, and whether or not it should involve more mining that you propose. OpenCoin leads made their decision.

If you recall to the time around the 611 crash, there were all kinds of self-proclaimed luminaries coming to this forum with ideas about the way Bitcoin should be fundamentally changed, and the blockchain reset to zero, just to make B fair, remove its shortcomings, etc. Since they had the option to implement their grand visions and didn't, i am glad the B dev team ignored them.

If the luminaries had implemented their brainstorms, Bitcoin would have been forced to change to compete. You had, have, and will have the option to compete with the OpenCoin Ripple business model. You'll have a chance to get the source of a project you proclaimed a "scam", and capitalize on their work to make it an implementation of your vision. I look forward to that, and will welcome it along with everyone else, IF its better.

So, rather than try to smear and shape the OpenCoin business model from the peanut gallery, my suggestion is that you begin organizing like-minded devs into the MrBig ripple fork team, take the Ripple source ball when available, and run with it personally to make the world a better place! I wish you well with that.  :)