Bitcoin Forum

Altcoins are not real competition for bitcoin.  They don't provide any substantial advantage over bitcoin - it's all the same digital gold - but Ripple with the distributed clearing house idea is something quite a bit more complex and potentially enabling.  

On the other hand OpenCoin declares to discourage XRP speculating and they have all 100 billion XRPs already created - so it might not gain such notoriety as Bitcoin.

Relevant to your thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201794

LOL @ OP

Ripple = pile of dodo

I am intrigued by the clearing house idea.  Somehow it is not advertised or explained much on the Ripple.com site - but they claim to be an implementation of the original Ripple idea that was about a distributed clearing house.  I believe that having trust factored into the system as a variable that is directly manipulated by users might lead to a system more robust against bubbles.

Ripple is designed to facilitate currency exchange, not product exchange, they aren't meant to be a currency.

It's like a metacurrency really. Just one more layer of abstraction to Grok.

OCripple is not Ripple.

Ripple does a number of very nice things for Bitcoin. My money says that if Ripple takes off, it gives Bitcoin a significant boost. Why? First, it can in principle make bitcoins easier to buy, and limit the number of points of failure of this infrastructure by acting as a distributed exchange. If the social lending catches on (unlikely in the near term, imho) then you don't even need to depend on gateways in order to buy bitcoins, it would just facilitate trades through peer networks.

More importantly, it hopes to be a currency-indifferent payment system. This means that anybody who accepts any kind of Ripple payment, also accepts Bitcoins. It also means that if you are selling a product, if you accept Bitcoin payments through Ripple, people can pay you in USD and it will be converted on the fly. Basically, it's a distributed, omnidirectional BitPay-like service.

There are more subtle reasons why Ripple would be a boon for Bitcoin: one is that the economics of providing liquidity means that the cost of Ripple payments between gateways in the same currency is related to the underlying costs of moving that currency around. This means that even on Ripple, payments in BTC will tend to be cheaper than payments in USD, so if people use Ripple, they may want to start using bitcoins. (Or they may want to start using XRP for the same reason.)

All of this is assuming that Ripple delivers: that OpenCoin delivers on its promise to open source rippled, and that the consensus mechanism turns out to be a good and scalable and secure way to operate something like Ripple, among others.

The role XRP play in this is uncertain – it does compete more or less directly with Bitcoin, but people may or may not end up using it as a currency if Ripple takes off. It has advantages and disadvantages over Bitcoin as a currency – faster confirmations and cheaper transactions, but (more) limited privacy and a troubling relationship with OpenCoin. Also, everybody who accepts XRP also accepts Bitcoin (as mentioned above), but the reverse is not true.

If they don't release the source code of Ripple server, there is no guarantee that the network runs the way they told you, it could just be another centralized e-cash, opencoin can withdraw at anytime and the network will stop to function.

If they do release the source code, then the Ripple framework would be infinitely replicable, anyone can just go and create their own Ripple network and release their own XRP, this could potentially mean that XRP has no value at all because it doesn't require a backup by computational power.

If they don't release the source then there is not much to discuss - nobody will use it.

This.

http://ripplescam.org/

Hmm - indeed pretty bad - but some claims are not true (OpenCoin is not hiding that the 100 billion coins are premined), some are speculative - like the fact that Ripple will not be OpenSource when it is released. 

I would agree that it it not worth a look if it is not 100% Open Source, and OpenCoin made a big mistake to declare it Open Source when it is only planned to be Open Source - but if you say that it is scam because it is not Open Source and they release it as Open Source then your argument is invalidated and you are left with an angry page with no true arguments.

Social payment might be enough, with relatively small trust limits.

If Ripple takes off it will be a Bitcoin killer, not a metacurrency. There's absolutely no reason to prefer to use BTC instead of XRP aside from speculation. XRP is a better currency than BTC because they can control the price and make it stable, with a gentle upwards slope guaranteeing a nice return in relation to the risk, say 10-20% per year. For people wanting to use it as a currency, that's a major improvent over BTC.

They don't market themselves as Bitcoin killers because they want to leverage the bitcoin community for their own profit, but make no mistake about it, Ripple is not "a distributed bitcoin exchange". Think of XRP as an improved bitcoin where the early adopters are the developers, committed to build and extend the ecosystem instead of simply hoard BTCs and wait for others to do the work. It's improved in many ways: instant clearing, high scalability, no need for a mining race, built in distributed exchange and many other features in addition to fixing the "Bitcoin early adopter incentives" problem.

Most of the crap on that website is just FUD or false, with one large exception: Ripple is centralized in it's bootstrap phase and is vulnerable to regulatory pressure for the first few years.

Edit: On the open source front,  they have little incentive to release it now in alpha phase, when most innovation takes place, pantents are being filled etc. and they are at high risk from disruption by someone who copy pastes an "open ripple". Once they are established, I agree with their website they have a major incentive to release the source, as long as there's no longer any direct threat from copycats.

When I researched Bitcoin i was amazed at how perfectly everything ties together; there are no loose ends, and any questions starting with "What if this happened..." are already thought of and answered within the protocol...

However when I look at Ripple there are so many things that could go wrong, that you just have to assume that it will go wrong at some point such as:

1) What if a huge gateway (such as Bitstamp) just decides "nah we're not going to do Ripple anymore"...and all their IOU are now worthless; it would bring the whole thing down, everyone would be trying to unload their worthless balances, it would be total melt down.  And the best part is Bitstamp could probably continue to operate as a regular exchange (what is Ripple going to do about it)

2) What if Opencoin starts leaking their billions of XRP onto the market to try to turn a profit?  As soon as people start to notice everyone will dump and run

3) What if Opencoin get shut down by the government?

4) What if Opencoin gets hacked and hackers use their Opencoin servers to do all kinds of bad stuff

5) What if Ripple itself gets hacked (source is still closed so no one knows how secure it is, there may be major security flaws)

6) What if Opencoin decides to randomly start doing bad shit like making more XRP, confiscating balances, banning accounts...etc..

These are just a few glaring "What if"s, I imagine people with more knowledge on the subject could come up with 20 more than this.

Basically Ripple makes Opencoin the de facto Fed...

It really is insanity that every Bitcointalk account created prior to February is now worth $300-$500...lols already got my $500 (in BTC)...I'm surprised the bitcointalk admins have not been tempted to start using old accounts to post their own Ripple address and cash in on this madness.

I wonder is gateways, such as Bitstamp, really considered what there were getting into; I mean if Ripple took off, in 5 years they could end up with outstanding IOUs of billions of dollars...are you telling me Bitstamp is prepared to hold billions of dollars in cash reserve to cover their IOUs...?  The last thing I'd want to be doing is running a gray market currency exchange (and yes I consider Bitcoin still a gray market; as laws/regs have yet to be applied) and have billions of dollars in the bank...(MASSIVE TARGET ON YOUR BACK!)?  Or they are planning to operate a factional reverse...god help us all...either way I wonder if they really thought through all the ramifications.

Their clients would sue them and win.


If you're worried about that, then don't invest in XRP. You only need tiny amounts to be able to use the Ripple functionality for other currencies, including BTC. And of course, OpenCoin has no motive to do this, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did. They want the XRP exchange rate to go up, not down, just not uncontrollably.


The protocol is distributed, just like Bitcoin, so governments cannot really shut it down any more than they can shutdown Bitcoin or Bittorrent.


Only a problem until OpenCoin releases the source code. It is in their interest to do so, precisely because it will dispel fears like that.


Scare mongering.

I'm going to sue Bitstamp for their Ripple IOU; are you kidding me, have you actually used the system yet?  There is nothing even closely resembling a contract between me and Bitstamp.  When you transfer Bitcoins to Ripple there is nothing but "Enter your Address", there is no text as to what they will give you, what that means, what their obligations are...nothing...somehow I'm going to use that to sue them?
Also what if I didn't get the IOU from Bitstamp directly.  It may have come from Bitstamp 10 years ago and passed through 10,000 people before it got to me and was then worthless.  Somehow I'm going to trace back the debt through 10,000 people and bring Bitstamp to court?

And even if you could sue Bistamp, then what, you get half of Ripple trying to sue a company for money they don't have?


You act as if XRP and the other currencies within Ripple are totally isolated and each in individual little bubbles...when in fact any panic with XRP would immediately spread across the entire system.  As soon as the confidence is broken.  

And of course Opencoin would not try to shoot themselves in the foot, but all it would take would be to slightly misjudge the number of XRP they were able to safely unload without affecting the market.  Too much and people start to notice and panic, panic, withdrawal, withdrawal, uh oh the gateways were running factional reserve and we have our first virtual "run on a bank"



How distributed it is; are there any stats available on this (ie how many full server nodes run by how many different organizations?

*This may be a noob question; but the only why I was aware that I could access my Ripple account is at https://ripple.com/client/, so if someone someone hacked that server, or managed mess with the domain...doesn't that mean bye bye Ripple, at least until they can get a new site up and running?

How is it only a problem until source is released...if when the source is released it contains serious security flaws; and hackers are quickly able to put through double transactions, or steal balances etc...

In which case what will OpenCoin do, start rolling back balances?  And the fact that they have the ability to do this is another cause for concern.


Not really trying to scare people; I'm just asking questions that I can't seem to find answers that I'm satisfied with.

P.S. I don't think Ripple is a "scam"; i just think there are too many things that could go wrong, and probably will go wrong.

Yes, but not for large amounts and I'm not going to at least until well after the code has been released.


If they accept your money and purport to issue and redeem IOUs then you can probably sue them, or at least report them to the police.


That may be more difficult.


It means they have an incentive not to cheat and users have a way to weed out bad gateways. This is how banks should operate IMO. Bitstamp are going to have to earn their trust lines.


Releasing "excessive" amounts of XRP would not impact the reliability of the Ripple system. If XRP tanks, there is no reason to start distrusting the USD balances. Reliability is a function of the source code (and the availability of independent validators, wider adoption etc), not of OpenCoin's "monetary policy".


Bank runs could happen and that's a good thing, because it keeps banks honest. But it's totally unrelated to the XRP exchange rate. And in fact, XRP is the only currency in the Ripple system that has zero counterparty risk and needs no exchanges gateways, precisely because it is handled entirely inside the Ripple system. Exchange rate risk, obviously, but no counterparty risks. And for IOUs it's precisely the other way round.


The protocol itself is distributed, but since the source hasn't been released there are only a handful of servers. If that doesn't change, no one in their right mind will trust Ripple.


Well, even then it's not really a problem because you shouldn't use Ripple to hold large sums of money until well after the source has been released and vetted, many independent validators and exchanges have sprung up etc.

I will spare over quoting just focus on this; as I think it shows we fundamentally disagree on the premiss that XRP and Opencoin have no affect on Ripple...

I think to say that "what Opencoin does with their XRP will have no impact on the Ripple system" ignores completely human nature and human history.

Even in recent months and years we've seen perfect examples of people seeing panic within other sectors and applying that same panic to their own sector.  When you see Cyprus, and yet this causes people in Spain and Italy to start worrying...although there was absolutely no evidence that similar government action was planned.

The difference is that in Cyprus the government is able to close down the banks and say "You can only withdraw 100EUR per day" and prevent a full scale melt down.  In ripple all there is no overseeing body to stop the panic, and the gateways would fall like dominoes.

For example:
- Opencoin sells some XRP and brings the price of XRP down too fast
- People start to get nervous about Ripple, they start to withdraw a portions of their holdings from Ripple to be safe
- The unusually high withdraw volume hits some of the gateways hard;  the ones that did not have enough reserves to cover the withdrawals
- People from the tapped out gateways are now bringing their IOUs to other gateways, these gateways either fold too, or block these IOUs causing further panic
- Everyone would be trying to cash out before their gateway went down...why risk having any money in Ripple when you could cash out and have the exact same amount if your own wallet
- End result you have a Ripple system filled only with bad debt; sure some people, who held IOUs from good gateways, managed to get out unharmed, but they would "get out" none the less
- I think at this point confidence in the system would be so badly shattered that people would never put money back into it (even the people who got out unharmed)

Now that is a "Ripple" effect :D


And please don't say something stupid like "This is a good thing, it keeps people honest".

Just one more quote...so you are telling me that I could go down to my local police station and report to the police that Bitstamp wouldn't let me redeem my Ripple Dollars :D  Sorry just can't help laughing when I think about the look on the policeman's face.

P.S. I don't see any mention of "IOUs" on the Bitstamp website; I don't really see the mention of anything, there is basically no text at all.

It's not stupid, it's the truth. Yes, irrationality can trigger a stampede, but that will only be a problem for those exchanges that practice fractional reserve banking. Then that is the problem, not the XRP exchange rate, and the offending exchanges will be quickly eliminated, thus solving the problem. I'm not going to hold large sums of money at an exchange, or in the form of IOUs until they have earned my trust, which may take a very long time.

No different than Mt Gox really. Do you think they could get away with not letting people withdraw their balances?

Unless of course the "Good" (non-fractional reserve) gateways had allowed people to redeem IOUs from other gateways before they realized there was run on; in which case their reserves (which includes IOUs from other gateways) are no longer sufficient to cover their own IOUs; despite being 100% funded.

And if you can only redeem your IOUs at the same gateway that you received them...then wtf is the point of Ripple?

And I find it pretty odd that much of your reasoning behind Ripple being a sound/safe system is that "I'm not gonna keep much money in it anyway"...so I guess it is pretty safe then, cause you didn't put much money in to lose... :D

It would still be their own fault, since they would not be managing their credit risk wisely.


You can still trade them with others through Ripple. As long as the exchange in question is solid, it's much quicker, cheaper and more anonymous than using the banking system. If the exchange is really solid, IOUs would only be redeemed infrequently compared to the number of transactions. IOUs are what allows you to trade in fiat currencies on the Ripple network.


I think the system is solid, but I want to see the source first before I start risking large amounts of money. And any financial institution will have to earn my trust, regardless of what software they use.

So let me get this straight any gateway that allowed IOUs from other gateways would be taking on credit risk and in the event of a run would not be able to pay back 100% of it's own IUOs because of the IOUs of other gateways it held were defaulted.

You have said that it's people own fault for using these kind of gateways that are exposed to the above credit risk.  So you would therefore say that all people should use gateways that only redeem IOUs that they issued themselves (and are therefore able to pay off 100% of their IOUs)

So lets assume all gateways only redeem their IOUs (because people would be silly to use a gateway exposed to risk you said).

Person A logs into Bitstamp, deposits Bitcoins, sends them to Ripple a Bitcoin IOU

Person B logs into Weexchange, deposits USD, sends them to Ripple a USD IOU

Person A trades their Bitstamp Bitcoin IOU for Person B's Weexchange USD IOU.

Person A logs into their own Weexchange account and redeems the USD IOU and withdraws their USD

Person B logs into their Bistamp account and redeems the Bitcoin IOU and widthdraws their Bitcoins.

Now ask yourself, what was the point in all that?  When they could have both just logged into Bitstamp and done the trade directly without ever having to go to Ripple?

Ripple project started before Bitcoin and it never was (and never will) a succesfull project.

You should only trust gateways that have earned your trust, likely through frequent audits of their assets and liabilities. And that includes IOUs issued by other gateways. Note that gateways could accept IOUs issued by other gateways at less than face value. The exchange rates between the various IOUs for the same currency issued by different issuers would be the best market estimate of their relative reliability.


It's likely to start that way, unless some very widely trusted banks get in the game.


If the market is comfortable with holding IOUs for a while, then you wouldn't have to redeem the IOUs after every transaction. In fact, between individuals this could be a very convenient mechanism to split a check after a dinner in a restaurant. Granting a person a trust line means you'll accept their self-issued IOUs up to a certain limit.

Oxymoron spotted! I think you're preaching to the wrong choir buddy.

There are a few AAA banks and credit unions left, but not many.

The key here is that Ripple creates economic incentives for people to mediate this kind of transaction. Person C can hold WeExchange and Bitstamp IOUs, and let Ripple trade them for a small fee. Person A would only use WeExchange, Person B would only use Bitstamp. If Person A wanted to send USD to Person B, Ripple would give Person C their WeExchange IOUs and give Person C's Bitstamp IOUs to Person B. There's a market for Person C's fee, so it will tend to approximate the actual cost of moving money between gateways (in bulk, after netting.)

If nobody's providing this service between two gateways, there's a huge incentive to step in and make it possible, because you can set whatever fees you want. If the fees are too high, there's an incentive to step in and compete by trading IOUs with lower fees. It's more or less inevitable that if there are two gateways in use for a certain currency, a market for liquidity between their IOUs will spring up. Currently I understand these markets are rather sparse and illiquid, in part because the client doesn't have support for setting those fees yet, and in part because there's only one major gateway right now.

I don't see why I would want to trust a series of inter-indebted gateways, by holding IOUs in Ripple, when I could either:

1) Trust the gateway directly (example by just hold my USD or Bitcoin directly in my Bitstamp balance)

2) Trust purely in the market/a single protocol (hold in Bitcoin wallet)

3) Truth a government and hold fiat directly

Why would i choose option 4:
4) Hold an IOU in a gateway that is holding IOUs from other gateways as the reserve for my balance, hold this IOU with a virtual currency protocol, having the virtual currency protocol controlled by a single governing body.

When you look at it; it's actually balling up and combining the risks from all 1,2,3 + a little extra risk to spice it up.

Anyways bed time...look me up in 10 years and we'll see where Ripple is; I took my $500USD and cashed out, i'll either look like a fool or a smart guy by then.

Have added the ripple scam website to my sig.
edit: its not working how do you add a url to your sig ?

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

Ripples are a way persuade people to forget bitcoins, and move back into inflationary centralised debt.

Funny how this is the same exact rhetoric was used against LTC, now that battle was lost Bitcoin zealots have a new scapegoat to attack.

I would even go as far as saying they are reliable anti-indicators.

Theres a world of difference between LTC and Ripple, Litecoins has all the same benefits and attributes as bitcoins, just with some parameters tweaked. Ripples are debt and the economy is centrally controlled. I'll endorse bitcoins, and all its clones but definately not ripples.

There is no reason you must do so, but for each of the alternatives you mention there are reasons why some might choose to do so.


You could do so, but then you are at risk of seizure / blocking by the government in whose jurisdiction the gateway operates.


Then you'd have exchange rate risk and exchange fees because not everybody accepts Bitcoin right now.


Not a good course of action for many governments.


Maybe because you live in Zimbabwe, or maybe because you want to launder drugs money, or money made by providing seedboxes for BTC etc etc, or because your government has outlawed Bitcoin and you cannot trade it openly.

Uhh, debt without interest that is...ripple requires people to trust each other, bad! bad! Not so with BTC there is no trust required and scamming people works without consequences, now isn't that nice?
XRP is just the financing model opencoin did choose, if you have a problem with that just have as much XRP as you need.

The real reason ripple is attacked is that XRP is truly deflationary and that makes Bitcoin "Investors" feel threatened. Ironically the ones they should fear the most come out of their midst.

Except the core developers and OpenCoin have admitted that XRP is intended to be a currency and they require it to have speculative value so they can fund development selling XRP to the public. Why do you think XRP is not meant to be a currency? Even the official word is that it is meant to be a currency. Ripple supporters are so misinformed its not even funny.

That "not meant to be a currency" goes for things like trading goods and (third party) services for it, which it really isn't intended to be used for. But intention and outcome often differ, so I wouldn't be surprised if it did.
After all I don't see any mechanism that would prevent that.

You already have your answer...
https://ripple.com/blog/ripple-reserve-lowered-by-75/

I think that must be their goal, how else would their XRP holdings become valuable?

I don't think they would mind that, though I don't think they secretly intend it.
But it can also become valuable by backing in terms of payment for usage of the network, and as currently speculative investment.

I like to think of XRP as kind of a stock which does pay dividends through deflation.

Both statements are more or less false. I assume the "almost no value" is so that it's easy for people to create new accounts and process transactions, and the "substantial value" is in order to act as DDOS prevention.

The various reserve requirements are adjustable, so they can remain low no matter what value XRP have. And the expected behavior of transaction fees is the following: typically they will have a very low XRP cost (transactions should be cheap, assuming the network can support it), but during a DDOS they will automatically increase in order to make the DDOS uneconomical. In order to continue the DDOS, they need to keep the network at maximum load as the fees compound – to do this for any extend period would require paying truly extraordinary fees. In the mean time, anybody wanting to use the network will just need to prove that their transactions are more important than the DDOSer's transactions by paying a higher fee than them on *one* transaction. (Rather than the many transaction fees per second the DDOSer is paying.)

What this means is that you will usually only need a very small amount of XRP to use Ripple (leading to a possibly low XRP price overall), but a determined attacker can pay an extraordinary cost in order to make the network temporarily more expensive to use. Remember that if a DDOSer makes it so that getting a transaction through costs a dollar, they're paying for many transactions per second at the same cost, or tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of dollars per hour. If such an event happened over a long period of time, the price of XRP would probably spike as people realized they needed it to send transactions – this is where the apparent paradox of almost no value and substantial value is resolved. However, given the built in cost and lackluster effects of running a DDOS on Ripple, it's hard to imagine that anybody would actually try to do this, and the price of XRP would remain low. The mere presence of this variable XRP transaction cost acts as an effective anti-spam device.

Of course, this has been explained to you before, so I don't expect that you'll be convinced by this repetition of the argument...

Yeah, what kind of fool thinks there needs to be any honesty in a financial system.

XRP is a pre-mined scam. People will not choose slavery.

How about only letting people redeem IOUs that the gateway can immediately redeem itself?  In a transaction - so that the gateway does not need to take risks - but still accept all kinds of IOUs (that are issued by nodes reachable from it).

There is one paradox that no one has ever been able to resolve: in order for OCRipple to work, XRP must have both almost no value and also - at the same time - it must have considerable value (to be viable to pay dev team, etc.). I have asked about this many times and never heard a good answer. All signs point to the XRP aspect being tacked on after the fact just as a money maker for OpenCoin, the utility of the system always being second priority. It seems extremely clever in that OC must have known XRP would take on a market value yet they advertize it as essentially worthless so they can look blindsided by the speculative phenomenon. "Oops, we got rich before even releasing our product."

Everything about the entire OpenCoin project just reeks of style over substance and the most brazen sort of milking Fugger's original idea for a chance to be an early adopter in the cryptocurrency realm. "Open" has so far been a lie, even as the creators enrich themselves on no utility provided to the community at all yet, very unlike Bitcoin. And "Coin" is just PR to try to associate itself with proper (mined!) cryptocurrencies, especially of course Bitcoin. It'd be like if Coca Cola tried to make a cryptocurrency system.

Finally, it's not that I begrudge people trying to make a profit. This is capitalism after all. It's just that they have actually put making money first every single time they had an opportunity to do so, even when it has damaged the usability and credibility of the system, seemingly intent on papering over this with a glossy marketing campaign. Of course for all we know they might just never release their product and simply hype it with teasers as they gradually sell off their XRP and ride into the sunset fabulously wealthy.

I don't think many people familiar with Austrian economics would be convinced that this is possible. It sounds like the central bankers' false belief that they can and should increase and decrease the money supply "as needed." Assuming this is a Hayek vs. Keynes type of issue, which it seems like it is, demonstrating why this can't work like you explained it would take us far afield. But the form of the debate would be familiar to people who are conversant in Austrian economics. Until we or some others have time to go through the whole argument piece by piece while also arguing for and against the possibility and utility of central economic planning, we'll have agree to disagree on this.

However, even before that, the assumption is wrong in the first place: the reason XRP must have substantial value is of course to pay the dev team. This is their actual plan. Everything about it is inconsistent. It takes but a few minutes' thought to see what they're actually trying to do: simply tack a superfluous, utility-reducing get-rich-quick scheme on to the original Ripple idea. Apparently paying off Ryan Fugger not to use the Ripple name anymore just takes the cake as far as co-opting is concerned. Final nail in the coffin if you ask me.

I should add that my opinion really isn't so final IF they actually release something that turns out to be very useful and decentralized. To be perfectly charitable to OC, I should say that I am simply extremely skeptical that they can do this, and the way they are conducting their PR is making it look very fishy to me (and, it seems to me, many or most of the more intelligent members of this forum). I do think, however, that they can convince the masses.

Another issue; when reading on the Ripple wiki about how to become a gateway i noticed this:

https://ripple.com/wiki/Gateway_Integration_Manual#Prerequisites

Does that mean you have to pay Opencoin fees to be a gateway.  If so how does that business model match up with planning to release the source, seeing as once the Ripple system is distributed and opensource Opencoin would have no way to enforce this?

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding and it just means you have to set how much you are going to charge your users...either way I'd like to know if Opencoin collects fees from gateways in order to gain gateway access.

You are misunderstanding correctly.  ;)

The fees are the fees the gateway can decide to collect. As I understand it opencoin receives no fees besides from deflation of XRP.

So why is it that no one has yet signed up as a gateway and then released (leaked) the rippled source?

I've got no idea. Perhaps it's just lack of interest.

What makes you think the source is available to gateways, as opposed to a precompiled binary for your flavor OS ?

In this forum I Speculate:

Ripple won't be around in 10 years.

Bitcoin will be.

I am sure it's been said 1000 times... but I don't think ripple has the same "validity" as bitcoin.

Ripple is a innovative concept, IMO, but I don't see it as any better than fiat when considered a currency. With regards to currency itself, what makes Ripple's XRP better than Liberty Dollar or existing things such as Liberty Reserve? (It's trust/IOU/p2p model is interesting though but seems like it might be more equvilent to Paypal than Bitcoin...) At least fiat has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons to force people to support it and to "protect" it. Ripple? not so much.

BTW: Cryptography > Nukes IMO, but Ripple has neither.

When did they declare that they are discouraging speculating?  I doubt this is true, speculating directly helps the company since they control XRP supply.   

As a cryptocurrency it's just like BTC, so your claim makes no sense.


The trust model only applies to fiat IOUs, not to XRP. It adds something that BTC doesn't have yet, a distributed bridge to fiat. And makes it available to BTC too!


You clearly don't understand Ripple.