Title: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: Remember remember the 5th of November on April 12, 2013, 11:15:18 PM Thread is serious. What the hell is Ripple??
Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: temor on April 12, 2013, 11:16:05 PM Like Bitcoin, except you don't mine it, and it's all centralized.
( at least that's what I gathered ) Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: Sukrim on April 12, 2013, 11:28:16 PM Instead of buying something that has been created out of thin air (Bitcoins) you can create "IOUs" from thin air of something you already have.
Ripple then allows you to track these and resolves debt circles (there's a story about a guy who goes to check out a hotel and puts down 100 EUR deposit, then the guy from the hotel pays the barkeeper etc. until he gets the money back, then the guest leaves the hotel again and takes the money with him) automatically. A potential use case would be a Ripple gateway that allows you to deposit USD and hands you USDs tracked on Ripple instead. you can then trade these for example for BTC, EUR or anything else. The person who then gets these USD can either redeem them at the gateway (e.g. get a back transfer) or use them for something else. As Ripple does not really use mining like Bitcoin (there is no real need for distributing currency randomly as everybody can create their own currencies and consensus comes from who you trust, it doesn't have to be global) they use their XRP currency as some kind of "postage stamp" for transactions - they get destroyed if you do a transaction. It seems that Opencoin (the ones who built the current implementation) want to sell these XRP to cover costs. Currently they are relatively rare as they are only obtainable by the "faucet" in this forum. I guess once Opencoin starts selling them though, they will be worth next to nothing and only serve as anti spam measure after all. Ripple is as decentralized as it can get, one of the biggest issues atm is that they didn't yet open source the server code to be able to implement changes that would be equivalent to a hard fork in Bitcoin without requiring their community to follow and/or build consensus. The other issue is that all XRP coins were pre-mined and are currently held mostly by Opencoin. Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: Luno on April 12, 2013, 11:28:51 PM And it's debt based like real money:
Ripple is a Bitcoin like P2P system to track debt between parties. The debt is transferable so you can "trade your debt"!!! You can also be you own Ben Bernanke by agreeing with a friend that you owe each other $100.000,000. This debt claim can then be Broken up in shares and sold like Ripple XRP is. Instant money out of thin air like a bank! Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: mr_random on April 12, 2013, 11:30:24 PM Something no-one understands except the creators lol.
Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: Sukrim on April 12, 2013, 11:49:07 PM And it's debt based like real money: Well, Compared to banks however users can decide for themselves which debts they trust and which they don't.Ripple is a Bitcoin like P2P system to track debt between parties. The debt is transferable so you can "trade your debt"!!! You can also be you own Ben Bernanke by agreeing with a friend that you owe each other $100.000,000. This debt claim can then be Broken up in shares and sold like Ripple XRP is. Instant money out of thin air like a bank! Try not accepting USD from Goldman Sachs debts... with Ripple you could do that! It is really not THAT hard to understand: Just as you get "IOUs" from MtGox when you deposit (they promise you to transfer you some USD or BTC in the future) you could also get IUOs from someone else. Once you realize that money (e.g. withdrawal request) then you erase the debt. Ripple just lets you trade this debt quicker and easier while still allowing anyone to redeem it. MtGox for example even issues these codes that let anyone redeem some value, Ripple is basically the same. You don't trade BTC there, you trade BTC redeemable on a certain gateway. Title: Re: Been living under a rock. What is Ripple? Post by: interfect on April 13, 2013, 01:41:55 AM Ripple is several things:
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