Bitcoin Forum

What is Ripple and how does it compare to Bitcoin?

Ripple is like PayPal. It sends money globally, unlike bitcoin it can't be mined.

ripple is a scamm. my opinion

Isn't it based around the same tech? Also I know they got caught storing passwords in plain text... salt and hash at least.

Quite a few people thinking this to be honest. Not so sure myself... need to educate myself further.

Ripple claim to be decentralized about 100 times through their site even though it is completely false, only a fool would purchase XLR and witness it suffer the same fate as e-gold.

Ripple's website seems VERY vague about how the whole thing works.  I seriously like the idea of a p2p exchange, but I hate that 100 billion (I think) XRP's are pre-mined.  I was about to jump in, but decided against it.

Checkout http://ripplescam.org/ (http://ripplescam.org/).

Good point. any centralized shit is scamm

What is going on with all these geek currency people?

Bitcoin is better with Ripple and Ripple is better with Bitcoin. it's so easy!

they can co-exist (BTC and XRP)
the ripple network is just great to exchange one coins for another. if we have to pay small fees to use it, well, it's understandable they have to make some profit. I think opencoin keeping 20% of the currency to their use is a bit too much

Ripple is a scam premined centralized trash coin. :P

We don't really know yet but the price of ripples has gone up someting like 1000% in the last couple of months so it is certainly worth watching and some people find it to have value even though some others do not.

Why do we need other currency when we have btc!

Ripple is basically just an exchange.

Good info. Thank you!

The fees are really tiny if you don't use gateways. And those gateways aren't even owned by OpenCoin, though the early ones may be paying OpenCoin fees themselves. Once the code is open sourced anyone can start a gateway, subject to local regulations.

just found this proxy buying service.  You can use either ripple or bitcoin to purchase on amazon.com

http://bitcurl.com

Looks interesting!

Ripple is certainly a good alternative to put your $ in sometimes vs bitcoin.  I am new to it but I like what I see so far.

Ripple as a concept as a peer-to-peer credit/lending network or digital hawala has been around since 2004 and as such is certainly not a scam.

There are also (partial) implementations by different people e.g. at classic.ripplepay.com or villages.cc

The XRP currency doesn't have much to do with this original concept.

The implementation at ripple.com by OpenCoin Inc promises to be more distributed once the server code has been opened, but certainly it's problematic that they start off in a more centralized manner. But the network will be able to work without any central authority like OpenCoin Inc behind it.

The XRP currency in this implementation just exists, "because they can", and are to be seen like post office stamps. A little amount of them is required for every transaction for anti-spam and security reasons, and they will be destroyed (not flow to OpenCoin Inc or anyone else).

I wouldn't say it's a scam, they're very open about their business model. Satoshi effectively "pre-mined" a lot of coins for himself as well, so with ripple.com it's just more official. They want to do without proof-of-work and mining because they think it's wasteful, their consensus algorithm doesn't require it, so the only way to issue their XRPs is by giving them away.

Bitcoin and the Ripple XRPs may compete in a way, but one thing that Bitcoin can do what XRPs can't is enable much more privacy. You'd mostly only have one Ripple account or address, so all your balances will be pretty much out in the open. Many privacy-unaware folks who already put everything on Facebook etc probably don't care much about this though.