Bitcoin Forum

This thread is in response to misterbigg's thread  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=211068.0)since he decided to delete my following message (why he did that, I don't think there is a purpose to ask) in his self-moderated thread:

"Stop deceiving Bitcoiners. In the Ripple system, Bitcoins can only be held as IOUs, they are subject to counterparty risk. Only Ripples are devoid from counterparty risk, while they also are needed to maintain an account balance and conduct transactions (fee). If the Ripple system becomes the main way to interact with Bitcoin, the market will inevitably begin valuing Ripples higher, as they share all the advantages of Bitcoin with none of the disadvantages. Bitcoin usage would shrink, since it has no purpose really.

Ripple does not complement Bitcoin. Ripple is more of a parasite that feeds off Bitcoin until it can stand on its own.

You have said it yourself in the past. Within Ripple, XRP is superior to BTC.

OpenCoin is trying to apply a spin of coexisting to bootstrap themselves, but make no mistake, their business model is to hold XRP (30% is what they promise) until they appreciate in value. Ripples are not meant as mere tokens, but in the same way as Bitcoin a scarce asset, only without proof of work and its disadvantages.

Stop the intellectual dishonesty and say it like it is.

XRP is a direct competitor to BTC."

he's busy deleting posts of mine as well.  he's a scumbag Ripple shill.

i simply asked misterbigg why a bank or financial institution would voluntarily participate as a gateway in the Ripple system when they have the Fed as an enabler?  why would they submit to OpenCoin?

anything less than a bank as a gateway will be considered a money transmitter and have to comply with FinCen regs.

I think the PR work OpenCoin is doing is really good, because they are appealing to people's dislike of MtGox's status and naivities of "decentralized exchanges". The main narrative is "we are not here to threaten you, we only want to help Bitcoin". Meanwhile, they are holding on to at least 30% of all Ripples hoping to make money off them in the future, ie have them appreciate in value. It's clever, really.

The truth about the decentralized exchanges is that while Ripple performs a slick unified interface, the exchanges themselves are still just that, centralized market places, subject to theft, legal issues, etc.

Then Opencoin will have to overhaul their system already, they issue only IOUs, which are legally not enforceable, I am sure people will flock to lend money that way....


Ripple doesn't look like it's created to meet some real needs, it looks like it's created to "look different from Bitcoin and look innovative".

The best part of their PR is they choose the correct audience: you can only find people who control significant amount of money and believe in bullcrap like that at the same time, among Bitcoiners.

Mr. Bigg deleted my rantional post in his moderated thread.

He doesnt like anyone who opposed or exposes what Ripple really is. If you disagree with his view you get deleted. Well at least I was...

you're absolutely right about them trying to steal Bitcoiners.

that's why they're here on this forum and had a booth at conference.

I take umbrage to this - there's no deception going on. This is one reason I deleted your thread. There's no place for personal attacks in my moderated discussion.


Yep, and this has been explained numerous times. Another reason why I deleted your post from my thread. There is no place for repeating the same things over and over again like TradeFortress, without engaging in any real discourse.


This is all true.


I wouldn't be so sure. In theory, if all the stars line up and all the vendors get on board with Ripple instead of Bitcoin, and there are no gateway defaults, and the government doesn't come cracking down on gateways, etc... then maybe in some distant future Ripple could be a competitor to Bitcoin.

Does this mean that Ripple will "kill" Bitcoin? I hardly think so. Did Apple "kill" Microsoft? Did the Euro "kill" the dollar? Ripple uses a different model of achieving consensus than Bitcoin. I'm sure that the market will value Bitcoin and Ripple appropriately.

But lets pretend for a moment that Ripple is so amazing that it renders Bitcoin totally obsolete (far fetched, but not impossible). Why should we feel bad about this? Clearly it deserves to "win" since it offers superior functionality. Everyone benefits from this scenario.


And this is another reason why I deleted the thread, baseless accusations.

After Bitcoin fell 80% from $266 to $50 and MtGox was under DDoS, there were many cries in the forum for "decentralized exchanges" and getting rid of the "too big to fail exchange" MtGox. Ripple solves these problems and more, and now you're saying Ripple is a parasite? Far from being a parasite, Ripple will enhance the value of Bitcoin.

Ripple even enhances the value of what I consider to be the worthless alt-coins like Litecoin and what not.


Yeah, I did say that.


Another reason why I moderated your post. Another personal attack.


This is all true.


And again a reason why I moderated your post. Yet another personal attack. And a baseless accusation, that XRP is a direct competitor.

Even if it is a competitor, shouldn't people be free to choose the currency they want? By your logic, all alt-coins are competitors and they are "intellectually dishonest" and they are a "parasite on Bitcoin." Do you really believe that? Ripple doesn't take part of Bitcoin's piece of the pie, it makes the pie bigger.

Now I certainly don't mind all of your personal attacks here. Children will be children, after all. But this is where it belongs - and not in my moderated thread which I am managing to keep high in signal and low in noise.

Another deleted one. lol. He doesnt like me exposing what he says:



Bolded above says a lot about said user.

Someone who doesn't think manipulation is so bad is because they are not on the losing end of the trade. Hence his comment.

Keep hoping.

lol you are so sold on something that hasn't become a reality and are so sure it will it baffles me lol.

I agree. What I have a problem with is that XRP are not marketed as an alternative but something of a byproduct. I suspect that this PR will change once the Ripple system is more widely used, and begin shifting to advertise XRP as a BTC alternative.


I don't know, we haven't seen the performance of the internal Ripple market place yet under stress. However, Ripple does not solve natural monopolies and its side effects. As more gateways emerge, we will simply have a new MtGox everyone goes to for the liquidity (which is currently bitstamp, as opposed to weex).


I do believe they are parasites, but I do not believe they are intellectually dishonest because they market themselves as what they are: an alternative currency. OpenCoin is marketing XRP as nothing at all except a mechanism to prevent network spam by requiring XRP for accounts and transactions. Meanwhile, they plan to make profit with 30% of all Ripples because they know it would acquire value, and this it will probably do so from Bitcoin.

And this is my main problem with the "spin" and why I call it intellectually dishonest.

+1 plain as day.

my own color on the situation added.

given he has deleted every post I've made in his thread...yup that too.

A fair point. It is still beta after all.


Well that's not quite right. There will always be a "most popular gateway", where popularity is measured by the amount of funds on deposit. But since anyone can be a "liquidity provider", competition will create the situation where it doesn't much matter which gateway you deposit your funds at, or which order books you use to get your bitcoins.

A future version of the reference client will show order books that are a composite of multiple issuers, so when you buy Bitcoins using your USD balance your order can be filled from multiple exchanges at the same time.

Ripple's pathfinding algorithm already looks through multiple books today, so when you send a payment it doesn't matter which gateway the receiver trusts - all order books will be evaluated to find the cheapest conversions.


I think that's actually a fair point. For sure, Ripple could have been presented better. It's quite confusing as it is.

Perhaps you could contribute some improvements to the presentation and explanations?

might as well spell them all out.

I get a really uneasy vibe from the overabundance of "It's ok bitcoiners, ripple is your frriiieeennnddd" posted all over their website and on this forum.

might as well spell them all out.

Why is it that Blitz can act like a civil human, but smoothie and cypherdoc act like asshats? Is this what happens when teenagers take to the forums?

So that explains you PMing me and judging me on my stated age? Which is in fact not my true age?

The fact that you would put my maturity to be tied to a number speaks volumes about your character, not to mention your stance on manipulation.

Keep telling yourself that we are "asshats" because you are the ass-sombrero.  :D

smoothie's 'ignore' button is colored for a reason.  :)

Guess what? I can create a Ripple in a day's time.

I just adjust the block generation time to 20 seconds(yeah, a lot of orphaned blocks and a lot of wasted computing power, but you guys will figure it out yourself right? In the end one branch will win, it's called consensus! :D)

And just to make sure that no one gets harmed because of their discarded blocks, I will just generate all the coins(XOPs I call them  ;)) in the genesis block, and reward them to whichever validators that please me most.

Job done! ;D

Yeah but I'm sitting in a glass house...

Jeff while your implications that I can be an ass are sometimes true, most of the time people ignore me simply because they can't handle the truth.

You seem like a very blunt person so I think you would understand.

That liquidity goes for the XRP part, but the other currencies are tied to the gateway as an IOU afaik. That's why I would think there will be inertia and natural monopolies will emerge, and also because some gateway will be most trusted, like MtGox is. In the Bitcoin system, it is already the case that Bitcoins can move freely (well, awaiting a few confirmations), and yet MtGox is king after years.

Wouldn't this give you IOUs of different issuers? So that to redeem them, you would have to create an account with each issuer.


Just don't hide that XRP are an alternative currency/store of value. There's already a VPN that accepts them.

your behavior as a used car salesman here on the forum is what irks me.

Yes there can be a most trusted gateway (i.e. the one that manages to attract the largest total amount of deposits across all currencies). But those deposits can be used to exchange for balances at any other gateway. I'll give you an example, with two hypothetical gateways "Bitstamp" and "Foobit", that each issue both BTC and USD. Bitstamp is the big gateway and Foobit is the tiny one.

First recognize that there are 20 order books in this scenario (!!!):

BTC.Bitstamp -> XRP
BTC.Bitstamp -> USD.Bitstamp
BTC.Bitstamp -> BTC.Foobit
BTC.Bitstamp -> USD.Foobit
BTC.Foobit    -> XRP
BTC.Foobit    -> BTC.Bitstamp
BTC.Foobit    -> USD.Bitstamp
BTC.Foobit    -> USD.Foobit
USD.Bitstamp -> XRP
USD.Bitstamp -> BTC.Bitstamp
USD.Bitstamp -> BTC.Foobit
USD.Bitstamp -> USD.Foobit
USD.Foobit    -> XRP
USD.Foobit    -> BTC.Bitstamp
USD.Foobit    -> USD.Bitstamp
USD.Foobit    -> BTC.Foobit
XRP              -> BTC.Bitstamp
XRP              -> BTC.Foobit
XRP              -> USD.Bitstamp
XRP              -> USD.Foobit

Now imagine that someone places BTC up for sale in the BTC.Foobit -> USD.Foobit order book. How can someone who is holding USD.Bitstamp purchase these bitcoins? First recognize that we want to send Bitstamp USD and receive Bitstamp BTC. Now consider one possible path:

USD.Bitstamp -> USD.Foobit -> BTC.Foobit -> BTC.Bitstamp

Ripple will look at these order books to calculate the depth and price:

USD.Bitstamp -> USD.Foobit
USD.Foobit -> BTC.Foobit
BTC.Foobit -> BTC.Bitstamp

It is unlikely that gateways will maintain walls in these books, because it would expose them to counterparty risk. Instead, liquidity providers (I plan on being one) will use software to keep automated bid and ask walls in the appropriate order books. For example, I will accept Bitstamp USD and give you Foobit USD. I will need to charge a small premium, which I will build into the offer. I might give you 1 Foobit USD for every 1.03 Bitstamp USD that you give me.

Repeat the process for each order book and now Ripple can supply you those Bitstamp BTC in exchange for Bitstamp USD, even though the best prices and depth are in a different issuer's order book.

As you can imagine, the number of combinations of order books across all issuers and currencies will explode in number. An alternative is that liquidity providers can maintain bids and asks for issuers currencies in conversion to XRP. The path in the previous example could also be written this way:

USD.Bitstamp -> XRP -> USD.Foobit -> BTC.Foobit -> XRP -> BTC.Bitstamp

or this way:

USD.Bitstamp -> XRP -> USD.Foobit -> XRP -> BTC.Foobit -> XRP -> BTC.Bitstamp

These examples show how XRP can be used as a "bridge" currency. By the way, this is all in the wiki.


You don't need an account at each issuer. That's the whole point of Ripple. You deal with a gateway that you trust, to handle deposit and withdrawal, and then you can access everything on the Ripple network no matter who the issuer is.

If you are holding the currency of a gateway that you don't have an account with, Ripple can easily exchange it for something that you would prefer to have by automatically going through order books and "rippling" through people who have extended trust to multiple gateways for the same currency.

This is the distributed exchange Bitcoiners have been dreaming of!

Off topic (sorry): Mr. Bigg claims I am making all the inflammatory comments and yet he comes into the non-moderated thread and calls me an asshat lol. So on top of everything else he even contradicts himself. Good job!

Yeah, it's pretty sad that the forum is getting into BTC-e trollbox levels :/


Please take a look in what has being happening for the past few days. This feature is not an advantage in all cases.

Ripple is what your rectum will do when you find out all your money is gone

Do we really need 6 topics about Ripple in the main forum? Namecoin only has one and I have way more respect for it than the ripple guys trolling the trolls. I motion that a mod move all ripple threads be moved to Service Discussion/Alt. Currencies as appropriate.

Thanks for that post, I didn't realize exchanging IOUs was possible. Now things get complicated and I have to think. ;D

Say I exchange my USD.Bitstamp for USD.Foobit. Now the appropriate balances on my Ripple account and the Ripple accounts of my counterparties have changed. How do Bitstamp and Foobit reflect this on their account balances? I assume they would be saying I own 1 USD.Foobit and 0 USD.Bitstamp. Then, I go to Bitstamp and send my USD.Bitstamp from my Ripple address to theirs and they update my balance to 1 USD.Bitstamp.

For this system to work, the balances at Gateways need to be linked to the balances on Ripple, and the sync time must be smaller than the time it takes to make a withdrawal from the exchange interface, or otherwise they lose money. Is that the case with Bitstamp today?

This happens when you try to send 100 USD.Bitstamp to someone who only trusts USD.Foobit. Ripple will find someone who trusts both (or trusts one and trusts someone else who trusts the other one, et cetra), and the person you sent to gets USD.Foobit.

This also means that some random Ripple user has just got his 100 USD.Foobit converted into 100 USD.Bitstamp or 100 USD.OtherTrusted, which may be a bad idea especially if it was just announced that Bitstamp got their bitcoin wallets seized. Or if USD.Bitstamp is actually a bond issued by Bitstamp that won't be repaid until four months later.

Quoting Deprived again:

A proper response to this really belongs in the Other Thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=211068.0). I copied my original reply.

Not when you keep deleting responses that you don't agree with.

once again, licensed money transmitters or banks are the only ones that are going to be allowed to perform these activities.  these are critical for the Ripple system to work.  absent that, its inferior to Bitcoin as it won't even be able to function as it depends on trust.

Bearer instruments, yada yada.

+1

but but but... that breaks opencoin inc's "steal bitcoin marketshare" corporate strategy!

THINK OF THE BANKS, ERM, GATEWAYS THAT WILL BE MISSING OUT ALL THEIR 0.2% 0.5% FEES!

Ah, I see the problem of my example.

When I send currency from Bitstamp into the Ripple system, it vanishes from my Bitstamp balance and appears in Ripple. To reappear, I have to send it from Ripple to Bitstamp. Forgot about that. So, if the Ripple account balances work fine, this is not an issue.

I'll have to think about the ramifications.

Why, how is it different from the licenses required for exchanges like MtGox? Do you mean that the people who do market arbitrage via the Ripple system need such a license?

You forget that XRPs require no trust.

This is all correct.


I don't think they need a license. And anyone in any country could provide the liquidity service. You could even operate anonymously.

The issue is USD.Bitstamp are bearer instruments. You can no longer trade Mt Gox IOUs for a reason.

XRPs do require trust (the ledger system is based on trust).

misterbigg has been quoted as stating that gateways will probably need to be banks with the appropriate licensing to provide large enough trust centers to facilitate enough liquidity throughout the system.  i think he's right about this need but fear it represents points of centralization.

he's also criticized Bitcoin as not having an unlicensed bridge from BTC to fiat.  well, neither does Ripple.  but the negative consequences for Ripple are much greater.

@cyperdoc: bearer instruments. Mt Gox stopped allowing generation of USD, etc codes for a reason.

The misrepresentation of Ripple has been most annoying to me in the 1 MB max block size debates. People just say that people could just use off-chain transactions through Ripple, because Ripple complements Bitcoin. Honestly, this has been one of the greatest issues I've had with how Ripple is being marketed.

Adding what I said in the other thread:

Ripple reminds me of Google wave.  It was neat, it had lots of potential, it was geeky, the few people who got it were really excited, and it ended up being totally worthless.

Now what this means is that there is an ability to trade currency IOUs with each other. However, one exchange will still have far more currency than another, and so, the IOUs should be limited if 1:1. It does not change the true bottleneck that is transferring national currency from one exchange to another on a macro scale, and so I think natural monopolies will still emerge. It's great for arbitrage though.

For example, if people wanted to switch from MtGox to Bitstamp via Ripple (if MtGox functioned within Ripple), this would of course not be possible, and so even if the valuation was 1:1 on the USD, the ratio would reflect the ratio of the USD on both exchanges. This makes sense of course if people really thought MtGox insolvent, since even 0.2 would be a good deal then.

So all in all, it's nice for price arbitrage and for taking advantage of an existing order book for IOU vs. IOU if one of its issuer goes insolvent.

@cypher; TF

Interesting, so the gateways will need even more expensive regulation to comply with than existing Bitcoin currency exchanges? That would be a massive hurdle. And of course it would make for even bigger monopolies than already exist on the Bitcoin market (MtGox). Everyone would be shut down until the first exchanger arrives that deals with all the regulatory issues.

I see it as a bunch of ad-hoc solutions hacked together, with no brilliancy at all.

In fact, you can just modify the Bticoin code slightly to come up with something very similar to Ripple.

"As long as my investment goes up in value, let us allow the banksters to fuck us a few times over, no big deal."?  ::)

The network effect of transfers, and the trust aspects of it are actually pretty clever.  It has potential.

But in being clever, they ruined everything that makes Bitcoin brilliant.  Bitcoin is brilliant because it is the perfect game theory play.  It motivates everyone to use it, intrinsically.  Ripple motivates no one except OpenCoin.

The "trust aspect" is what I would call "ad-hoc", by trying to reconciliate with the status quo, not that it's entirely unnecessary, but the established do it much better than them.(As corrupt as the banksters can be, certified financial professionals can still handle debt matters much better than one random sucker on the internet), there is no reason for people to justify the cost of transition. Other than that, I agree with you.

This is an interesting thing to note ^.

Profit = Motivation. Hence why scammers exist alongside businesses.

Hey, there's so many recent threads debating ripple I don't know where to put this.  Also I don't want to make another thread.


Did anyone see the speech on the NetSuite system for business etc?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx7-R11_DDw   (from digitalmagus7 series 2013 conference)

Having had a small business myself in the early net days.  I used software for sales inventory etc.  Had a credit card system to swipe cards to accept those.  You know typical small business.

Wouldn't this software accomplish everything ripple is saying by just having the software (and of course compliance to regs)?

A company like new egg could use this software and deal in worldwide currencies instantly right?  Isn't a system like this, then, a good option for mass-utilization of BTC without centralization or Ripple?

Am I missing something?
Thanks, sorry if in wrong drop of ripple threads xD

Why is this not in alt-coins forum?

+1 I wanna know too. We have like 3-5 threads about ripple here.

No, it wouldn't. It would be a better idea to grasp what ripple is: a flawed debt marketplace and a premined currency.

I believe we are overreacting to Ripple.

I will ask you a question: when you first heard about Bitcoin, why did you fall in love with it?

Maybe because is decentralized. Or because the inflation is built into the system to pay miners, who secure the network. Or because you do not need to trust any third party.

We all know Ripple has nothing in common with Bitcoin, except that it uses cryptography too. Ripple is a debt based system, you hold and trade IOU's, and in fact Ripple takes to a distributed level all the flaws of the banking and financial system that we bitcoiners dislike.

I would say this is not a Ripple fault - it deals with fiat currencies, and the flaws of a trust and debt based system are inherent to fiat currencies.

Then, Ripple has his own crypto, but it's 100% premined and controlled by a private company. I think everybody interested in cryptos will agree that this fact is a huge drawback, and quite the opposite of the cryptocurrency philosophy founded by Bitcoin. I myself would be very worried about transferring significant value to a currency with XRP's characteristics, as a single player has too much power from the very beginning. We could say that is the "get rich tool" of a handful of individuals who control the immense majority of it, this is its purpose, and everybody can see it.

Last but not least, I have security concerns with Ripple. I still do not get what is the incentive of validators to run the nodes. Mining in bitcoin has a very clear purpose and a very clear reward everybody understands almost immediately - and everybody would have the motivation to mine under the correct circumstances. But what about validation nodes in Ripple? Their security model is still unclear to me - maybe mrbigggg can shed some light?

Making a long story short: I can understand the accusation of Ripple wanting to "profit" from Bitcoins appeal, but I do not think they will be able to harm it. At least I hope XRP's won't be able to harm Bitcoin, because as a crypto currency Bitcoin is superior in so many ways and everybody can see it.

I'll just quote yourself:


So why some are "overreacting" to Ripple?
Perhaps because this is a Bitcoin forum and yet it seems to be the main Ripple publicity platform?

Edit: In fact "Bitcoin" seems to be their biggest publicity platform. Weren't they at the Bitcoin conference?

My biggest worry is that its not open source, and they just lie saying it is.  Just blatant lies.

I can understand they do this not because of bugs, beta, etc, but because they want marketshare, and once they have it, it might be released as open source.

Fact is they don't care about open source, its just all excuses to get marketshare, and be noticed by a bank or investors.  And its working.

As for the Mt.Gox comment about everybody wanting a distributed exchange, yes, people want an open source distributed exchange, not a closed source one owned by one company.

It's quite simple, really.  Bitcoin does not need Ripple, Ripple does not need Bitcoin.

Now let's move this (and the other Ripple threads) to a different sub-forum.

XRP's market cap is currently 1.875.000.000USD - more than 37% higher than BTC

Guess who said that and in what context.

And I still see nearly nothing real being bought with it(I checked nearly all Ripple forums before I say that), does that mean it's the greatest scam ever? ::)

Frozenlock: you got a point there :)

I guess that I'm oscillating between two approaches:

A) Ripple is the reproduction of a flawed, debt based system, willing to parasitize Bitcoin to ultimately compete with it through a pre-mined crypto controlled by a handful of individuals

B) Ripple is really everything stated in a),  but their crypto has no real potential to compete with Bitcoin

I have to also admit that this heavy promotion among bitcoiners kinda irritates me.  I'm testing Ripple intensively, and as you all know you do not hold BTC in Ripple, you hold BTC IOUs. This kinda defeat the whole purpose of using BTC's. What would Satoshi think about people trading BTC IOUs? Heck, you can also create more BTC IOUs inside Ripple than the total amount of Real BTC existing.

Exactly. Which is why I feel it's important to start up a negative publicity campaign against Ripple and OpenCoin Inc.

Advertising on bitcointalk.org is just the start.

Being civilized is nothing to be proud of. It means to be dehumanized, brainwashed, collectivized, governed, ruled, slaved.

I hope OpenCon's Cripple system never catches on.   :P

They need to stop lying about the open source claim because it makes the whole project look intellectually dishonest.

I am surely not a Ripple fun and I don't ever had any Ripple but I must state that misterbiggs and joekatzls posts are very civilized and very rational at the first view. Probably they are the best payed Ripple bloggers. On the other side they are a lot of trolls payed with a couple of Ripples which are spreading a lot of erroneous rumors and are spamming and irritating everywhere. They are doing the dirty work for the top Ripplers and their boss in the background and they can remain with clean hands.
I must recognize that is a very clever organized system oiled with 50 millions of $ + some from Google.

Read closer of Mr. Bigg's posts.

The guy condones manipulation, he hopes Ripple can establish gateways for people to open up "checking accounts" to use ripple, he claims a lot when most of what is claimed is not even reality.

He calls people asshats because we disagree with him and he censors posts in his moderated Ripple shill thread.

Also the guy is so immature as to PM me to tell me that based on my posted age on my account on this forum (which is not true) that he is shocked how I act. This shows me that he likes to classify people by their ages which I for one am against.

This is the same guy that claimed Litecoin was a scam when it was at 6 cents and look how wrong he was. Litecoin isnt even controlled by a central authority yet he claimed Litecoin was a bullshit copy.

He hopes Ripple/OpenCoin turn a profit then he will be profitable with his XRP investment.

I certainly hope those thinking about using Ripple actually wait until what OpenCoin says they are going to do...they actually do. So many broken promises  and mislabeling of what Ripple is and isn't by the creators.

Lastly, I listened to Chris Larsen talk in the alt-chain panel at the conference this past weekend and each time a question was posed his answers didn't really sell Ripple as viable alternative to Bitcoin nor a compliment. For being one of the main ripple talking heads not to be able to CORRECTLY and CLEARLY describe what the Ripple system is and how it works, is quite a big failure.

LOL Smoothie, he must be very pissed :D

Sorry I didn't read this post of misterbigg. That means that he gave himself lower as he was before or the former rational posts he just copy pasted from a Ripple archive or different persons are acting 24/7 under this name and some of them are not so good educated.

I walked by the Ripple booth probably a dozen times this past weekend.

Did anyone see any executives like Larson answering questions?  The only ones I saw were devs.

I am not indicating he can/can't act rational.

My point was don't be so easily deceived by what HE or the Ripple fan boy club are saying, but what they are DOING.

Actions speak...well you know the rest... :D

Pssst, executives don't deserve to have to talk to mere mortals!

Each time I passed I either seen Joel or Stephan (? is that his name). So no I did not see anyone else there and I too passed the booth several times.

Of the 4 alt-chain panelists that were there speaking on the mic, the only one I drew into real question was Chris Larsen. All the others appeared to know exactly how their systems worked and could answer very clearly what it did and how it worked without any super long explanations that really said nothing.

Just ask Cypher, he was sitting right next to me...lolz

As Maged said, the part that irks me is that Ripple is being advertised as something that it isn't. I hate that. It is scummy as fuck.

Even if Opencoin releases their source code as they promised, it takes very little to create a clone network that makes a bit of improvement here and there, bundled with another currency hot off the "printing press", which its creators will do everything(yeah, including being a better network operator than Opencoin) to push the price to very high level.

In fact I believe most of the things that Ripplers boast about Ripple can be easily implemented by slightly modify Bitcoin's source code, just that no one will try to implement such  a flawed system.

Right in the spot.

Also, ripple is:
- NOT Open Source (lies on site & wiki)
- NOT Decentralized (lies on site & wiki)
- NOT Based on "the same underlying cryptography as BTC" (lies on site & wiki)
- Printable/Inflatable in any amount, at any time by its creators

For more, check my signature.

I've been thinking for weeks about what was bugging me about ripple. You just said it.

I've long been suspicious of this misterbigg guy in general. He defends Ripple to the death in every thread and so many of his replies are like freaking essays on the subject. I asked him if he was connected to the Ripple project and he said no... but I find it hard to believe he doesn't stand to gain massively from peddling his rubbish through the forum day and night. What else would drive him to do it sooo much?

But I digress.

I dislike Ripple for various reasons - closed source, dentralized, the owners hold too much of the money etc. But my biggest gripe is how so many of the shills present it as an complement to Bitcoin on the forum yet in the media the people behind it openly state they see Ripple as a competitor to Bitcoin.

And the number of times Ripple shills have said oh these XRP aren't primarily meant to be used to pay for things etc yet they say in their interviews XRP becoming valuable is their entire business model.

Yep

IT companies in financial or innovative area(if both like Ripple than even more) all asking their workers to keep secret their salary and and other internals. So misterbigg probably may not disclose some details of agreement with the Ripple network. If you ever worked for a financial institute(especially as IT) than you must know that.
I understood from some of his posts in this thread where he spread some hints that he is very well gaining from Ripple.

There seems to be an extremely serious technical flaw which goes to the heart of an IOU trading system:

All IOUs for the same real-world instrument (BTC, USD, Gold, Oranges) are regarded as fully fungible 1:1 even though they originate from different people with different circumstances. This means that:

a) there is no accounting for expiry or settlement. IOUs are issued with no agreed redemption date. This means payers are effectively making open-ended gifts.

b) there is no weighting for the creditworthiness of the issuer e.g. an IOU for 100 USD from person X equals an IOU for 100 USD from person Y, even though person X has a million-dollar house and person Y lives in a culvert.

A further problem is social.

1) 1000 years of Contract Law
2) Ripple
3) Bitcoin

Which is the odd one out?
(Hint: two of them attempt to overcome a particular human failing...
Breaches of trust

Even as it currently exists I think Ripple has some very interesting properties and could be used in a way that would solve certain problems related to liquidity between Bitcoin and legacy currencies.

The properties that I'm interested in do not include the viability of OpenCoin's business model, or XRP price speculation.

AFAIK This is not true. You can set up a fee so when IOU-BTC-Bitstamp are converted to IOU-BTC-SOMETHING-ELSE through your account, they are not 1:1 anymore. This is called "transfer rate".

Yeah.. I tend to agree. So maybe we could see something built on top of bitcoin using some of these ideas? IOU/debt thing is interesting, although I don't fully grok Ripple yet. (haven't spent enough time with it)

That is a really interesting (and to a point eye opening) explanation. I have my reservations about tying any kind of IOU system to BTC. Further, the whole Ripple project seems really complex and a bit tricky - even for tech guys to get. Sounds almost like a potential Trojan Horse to BTC. I say we approach this carefully, very carefully. Get that thing open sourced and have the experts look into it. The longer it is closed, the more we have to worry.

I'm open to studying this Ripple thing more though. Bitcoin clearly needs a decentralized form of exchange at some time. I'm just not feeling it is Ripple at this point.

IAS

These are real pitfalls that can not be solved from within the Ripple system (which is really just a ledger), but potentially could be addressed by out of band agreements between the participants, assuming those participants fully understand the issues involved and are willing to go to the trouble.

It's probably not worth the effort needed to use Ripple safely when you're talking about transfers of BTC, however when you talk about dollars and other legacy currencies the cost/benefit ratio becomes significantly more favorable.

One thing that would assist Bitcoin adoption would be if users could pool their dollar (euro, etc) liquidity while running Localbitcoins exchanges to help new users move into and out of BTC. The easier it becomes to move between BTC and legacy currencies, the more BTC people will be willing to hold. Ripple could help achieve that if it was used for "community credit" instead of relying on gateways.

Basically the best parts of Ripple are exactly the features that OpenCoin isn't focusing on.

Again, I'll repeat myself.
You can set up a fee so when IOU-BTC-Bitstamp are converted to IOU-BTC-SOMETHING-ELSE through your account, they are not 1:1 anymore. This is called "transfer rate". So there is no problem. You can set this fee to 90%. That mean that you need 1.9 of IOU-BTC-SOMETHING-ELSE to convert it to 1.0 of IOU-BTC-Bitstamp.

Can Ripple automatically calculate the optimal values of these exchange rates to compensate for default risk, or will setting those require some out of band information?

Default risk can only be perceived externally, as it is an event that is most likely only happening once (e.g. pirateat40 paid consistently every last Bitcent until it all went POOF and then he consistently paid 0 Bitcents any more). Also Web of Trust ratings won't help much (again: pirateat40 had a flawless and highly rated WOT account). There might be some service option similar to rating agencies that might release their opinions in a format that oyu can plug it into your Ripple client automatically, but still knowing the real risk is not something that can be really calculated.

Back before banks discovered they could just dump their losses on the taxpayers and depositors, they developed a series of techniques for estimating default risk that work reasonably well, and people who want to use Ripple successfully would need to use similar techniques in order to estimate the amount of trust they should assign.

That means borrowers should disclose their balance sheets to creditors, develop rational methods for assigning value to their assets (reserves), and pay attention to debt to asset ratios as well as debt service to income ratios.

None of those things happen within Ripple; they have to be done manually, out of band.

You could, of course, just assign trust based on other factors without taking any of the above into account but that would be exactly like throwing money at pirateat40.

listen to what justusranvier just said about how "real" banks do due diligence.  anything anyone does with fees within Ripple will just be a guess.  especially since it will be a primarily small tx network.

this will lead to chaos.

i think you just gave us the 30 sec elevator speech for Ripple.

There are some discussions about Ripple(s) going on right now on /r/bitcoin.
The Ripple supporters alternate back and forth between
"XRP are as good as worthless and will totally never be used as a currency, guaranteed"
and
"XRP do have worth and will be used to pay Opencoin for their efforts in creating Ripple, which is totally fair and not a problem at all, even when they premined 100% of the XRP themselves and are a for-profit organization that will most likely try to maximize their profits in any way possible".

I would probably be a great supporter of the Ripple system, if the way Opencoin designed it didn't seem to me like the (potentially) biggest premine-scam ever pulled off.

The fact that Ripple is centralized, in direct opposition to bitcoin, made me doubt it. Putting it like this:




(Link:)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=207764.msg2175819#msg2175819


I have never gotten a very valid answer as to how many people control Ripple.


If it is under the control of a few people, it is against the whole bitcoin idea.


...and nevermind that it is closed-source.  :o

Why would someone think trying to sell the ability to create IOUs to bitcoiners would give them anything but shit and drama? Debt Stinks... I should know  ;)

I said it in another thread and I'll say it again here.

Ripple is the corporate/banking world's attempted co-op of the crypto-currency movement.

It says, "Hey you know that crypto currency idea?  Well it sounds great, but why don't we centralize it so we can make a huge profit instead of allowing the common people to create added wealth on their own."

The main thing to focus on here is CONTROL, ripple gives control back to a small group of individuals which flies completely in the face of the philosophy of cryptocurrency's "forefathers".  Im very concerned greed and stupidity(along with PR firms hitting the airwaves and brainwashing the gullible masses) will win out and people will slowly start backing ripple over bitcoin.

This is simply false. IOUs aren't interchangeable in Ripple until you say so. If you say that you are willing to accept IOUs in a given currency issued by a certain person, then Ripple will make use of that when routing payments. If you don't, it won't. If you are willing to exchange IOUs in the same currency issued by different gateways or even individuals, then you can specify the exchange rate and Ripple will make use of that when matching trades and routing payments. By default, the Ripple system will not accept anyone's IOUs and won't trade one person's IOUs for another's, let alone 1:1.

That's a healthy amount of money you have there misterbigg!

I don't use exchanges and I don't plan to. At least with MtGox and other exchanges I would know what I would be getting into.

Has anyone claimed Ripple to be open source? If the answer is yes, where is the source code?

Has anyone claimed Ripple to be decentralized? If the answer is yes, is it infact true?

I'm not trying to troll, these are legitimate questions. I haven't been following Ripple lately, because I don't particularly like IOUs.


He obviously values IOUs from a central authority which has recently had their liquidity threatened.

what is wrong with you?  can't you get the message when your threads keep getting moved off Discussion?

like i said before:

in Bitcoin, exchanges aren't critical for the network to funcition.

whereas in Ripple, licensed trusted financial institutions, are.

You know what they call people who only make self moderated threads in the alt currency section?  Scammers.

Fitting for MrBig here, the scamcoin Ripple shill, to associate himself with that lot.

In Bitcoin you can ONLY get other Bitcoins (that you "own") or untradeable and implicit IOUs in transactions. In Ripple you can get XRP (that you "own") or tradeable and explicit IOUs in transactions.

Ripple is complementing Bitcoin, not trying to replace it. You can use it if you either trust somebody else (e.g. a gateway) or if you are trusted yourself (so others will accept your IOUs and you are the gateway), no matter the actual currency.

Simply not true, not for making payments in Ripple and not even for trading IOUs.

Ripple serves no purpose except adding an unnecessary intermediary to the transaction.

It's like asking someone to print an email, buy the stamps (XRP) and send it via postal rather than sending it electronically in the first place.

Well with the old scamschool running abeach what with the twin MtGox/BFL failures, he needs something new.

In general you can tell which projects are scams by who promotes them. See any goat/rosenfeld/kenna/katz/gmaxwell/lukejr/blablabla behind it...run.

But, but... he hasn't even posted yet! https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=27249 :D

So what is left for Ripple if you do not involve yourself with any transactions involving Fiat? Is there a way to transact Fiat without being dependent on exchanges?

For most users, probably nothing. Perhaps a group of interconnected businesses would find it useful to monetize their accounts receivable and conduct payment in kind transactions between themselves.

Yes, but it will take a lot to build because you'll need a lot of communication and logistics outside of Ripple to make it work.

Using it to make payments with XRP would be very useful for most users.

That begs the question of why anyone would want to hold XRP in the first place, and contradicts claims that XRP is not a direct Bitcoin competitor.

I think it is both hugely synergetic (through the Ripple interface with fiat) and a direct competitor (XRP). I think both are good a thing.

And in my opinion very unwise... just from giveaways alone it is easy to pump + dump the thin internal markets, not even counting the reserves opencoin has.
XRP might have their uses but I would not recommend on using them as value store. Similar to Bitcoins by the way, which are also held quite centralized and are traded on comparatively thin markets.


boonies4u, if you for example only want to deal ever in Bitcoins in your whole life and Ripple gained traction and you are either trusted by a few people or do trust someone like MtGox, BitJAM, SilkRoad or for example somebody who runs an OpenSource Bitcoin<->RippleIOU gateway (sample code for that can be found in the github repo actually) for let's say 10 BTC temporarilly, you can actually live on Bitcoins for the rest of your days.

You would set up the 10 BTC trust line (enough for a month wage), your employer sends you your payment in USD and you automatically receive the IOUs from your gateway, maybe even with an email alert. You then (maybe again even automatically) withdraw these IOUs or most of them as "real" BTC and you're golden. Once you want to buy something on Amazon, all you do is fund your account by sending some BTC to your gateway, waiting for 6 confirmations and then sending the payment to whatever merchant you want. Ripple selects the cheapest path by itself and just telly you how many of your BTC IOUs that item will cost. If you agree, you hit "send" and the merchant receives whatever currency IOU he prefers (e.g. USD from Paypal). You don't know and you don't have to care - all you ever have to touch is BTC and 1 XRP every million transactions or so.

Absolutely, in the near future. But I think the success scenario is one where XRP sees wide adoption as a currency.

So if something goes wrong and it so happens that one of the parties down the path (Ripple chose) turns out to be illiquid, what happens?

Well, I guess we have to agree to disagree in this point. I hope XRP keep some certain mostly static value which would make them useful as intermediate currancy within Ripple, but I don't hope they will be used as currency directly.


They get TradeFortressed and end up with bad debt that they agreed to accept. It doesn't influence you or anyone else who didn't trust this bad issuer just like you are not affected directly from Bitcoinica going belly up if you didn't have BTC lying there.

"Trust" in Ripple means:
"I would accept a check of up to __ units of currency __ from issuer __."
When you cash this check and if it is actually still "good" is your problem. If you accept checks from 2 different issuers, you can trade between them (e.g. I can offer to pay you 0.99 BTC for a 1 BTC "Bitcoin Code" from MtGox), which is how Ripple does path finding.
TradeFortress for example wrote himself a check of 1 billion or so BTC and then claimed this is a flaw in the system. It isn't - it's exactly how it is supposed to work. There is nobody stopping you from taking a blank check and writing "1 googol USD" on it either. You might have a hard time paying with it though probably.

what really matters in crypto-currency world is who benefits from 1. Adoption 2. Economic Growth 3. Productivity Increases.

Ever since the Federal Reserve and their "price stability" directive, all fiat currency value increases from Economic growth and Productivity increases have been soaked up by governments (via issuance of new currency).

So, this is why I don't like ripple ... Like the Federal Reserve are with fiat currencies, the Ripple managers are set up to benefit from 1. Adoption of XRP 2. Economic Growth in XRP usage and 3. Productivity increases (which tend to deflate prices relative to an un-managed currency).

The beauty of Bitcoin and other decentralized, limited supply crypto-currencies, is that the holders and participants of economies built up around these currencies are the primary benefactors of 1. 2. and 3. mentioned above.

Besides, there will be natural price stabilizing forces in the crypto currency world such that xrp is not needed.  When the value of currencies rise too high, there will be high demand for Alternate crypto-currencies (ltc, ftc, nmc, cnc, trc, etc.)  When value of crypto currencies wanes, the less popular/functional alts will die off.   We don't need a centralized market maker trying to provide price stability ... that will come as the crypto-economy matures.

I take it back. The inclusion of Mr blablabla on that list was a rash and inconsiderate move on my part.


Seems it has about the same chances as paypal's coin or w/e.

Ah... the "challenging Superman" idealogy. :)

Except this is only good hypothetically, and doesn't pass a reality check.

You can't really trade IOU between two issuers because they aren't on the same terms even if the value of the debt may be the same.

For example, there are differences in withdrawal limits that are not reflected in the Ripple system.   One issuer may allow for withdraw of up to $1000 per day, and the other may allow up to $50,000.   If you receive IOU from the first issuer, it will take you 50 days to recover your debt instead of 1 day from the latter.

In addition, how you withdraw your funds between the issuers are also different.  Some allows for withdrawal to Dwolla, some allows for inter bank wire within only Europe or China only.    There is no use getting a IOU if there is no way of recovering the debt.

I suggest Ripple proponent to read up on how how the current Bank Wire System works (http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/21775/how-do-wire-transfers-get-settled is a good start). 

Then re-look at the Ripple system again, and see if it can really achieve true decentralization operation when Fiat money is in the equation.

Bitcoin is brilliant because it explains its solution in a non-obscure manner.   It is solving a "Double Spend" issue using decentralized timestamp system -- easy to understand.

All Ripple does so far is making lots of assumptions and hypothetical examples (that show a lack of understanding of the actual financial system) without articulating what exactly they want to solve, and the value its solution to the various players in the eco-system.

There is a 'simple' problem out there that waits to be solved. It is a problem of trust.

The need to store some value is based on the lack of trust that value that you currently hold is secure and stable.

The problem with the 'normal' banks is that CEO can go nuts and spend all your deposits on some trade, some over-leveraged short or long option contract, and then you have to pay for it. It is a problem of trust. In fact he can Corzine your money and, as long as he has good political connections, good luck getting back that money or suing him.
It all boils down to trust and the fact that, realistically, you can't trust anyone. Yet, the only option you have are non-transparent, often unenforced laws, that may or may not be applied to the institution where you keep your saved value.

Consider, Fed was allegedly created to solve the problem of bank runs. If somebody can always print the money that bank wasted on nonperforming loans, and give it back to you when you request it from a bank, why would you ever be worried and run on the bank?

I am convinced that present day cryptography may solve this problem and that Ripple gateway, if armed properly, can start playing the role of the good ole' bank, where your deposits simply can't be used for investment, or for a loan to someone else, unless you explicitly approve of it.

You want to lend and collect some interest, and have somebody else do it for you? Fine, shop for the gateway that offers you the best rate and that you trust. No decree on the rate from any academic.

As little as that would be a great start.

BitCoin, by design, has no such problem ... until it encounters a gateway, a bank, an exchange, etc. Then all the hell breaks loose.

They are not exposed in the current clients, they are very much reflected and built into the design of the Ripple system.

https://ripple.com/wiki/Contracts (<-- most general solution)
https://ripple.com/wiki/Gateway_policies
https://ripple.com/wiki/Authorized_accounts
...and a few more.

It's perfectly possible to restrict all holders of a certain IOU to max. 1000 USD per anonymous account for example and to offer registered/authenticated accounts with higher limits similar to MtGox.

You wouldn't (actually shouldn't) trust a gateway that you cannot use - if you don't have a Dwolla account, don't trust gateways that only allow withdrawal via Dwolla. You might have a Paypal account though and somebody else might have both types of accounts, so there is likely a pathway from Dwolla to Paypal in the system that will be used.

http://lyle.smu.edu/~tylerm/fc13.pdf

Page 3. I will laugh at you with ripple gateways shut down, and I am confident that Bitstamp will be shut down within the next year because they offer bearer instruments due to the use of ripple. Hence why no legitimate exchange that will last will use Ripple because that's illegal.

I spotted at least 1 error in that table just by skipping over it, interesting read nevertheless.

Actually it's easier to be licensed as a Ripple gateway than a Bitcoin/fiat exchange, at least in the EU. I'm not sure how this empirical analysis of some Bitcoin exchanges that shut down mostly while bitcoins were worth a tiny fraction of what they are worth today relates to my points that you quoted though.

Well said, and to restate what mobile4ever said: Services like Ripple are destined to go the way of any service which proposes to establish Bitcoin functionally within the existing Fiat frameworks. Bitcoin is not meant to live alongside Fiat. It is meant to kill it. With extreme prejudice.

Again, I just get the feeling that Ripple, though it can do good things, is designed as a way into the BTC ecosytem. It could be used as a heist like system to BTC - the more I look into it. I also get the feeling the XRP thing is being used as a "oh, it's no big deal, not about money, not central to Ripple, etc." and then when Ripple takes off it will be "Get your XRP's now, while they are still cheap and you still can. Government regulators are going to come down on BTC."

Something just doesn't sit right with Ripple. And I bet we together will find out. Further, since it will be open source, why don't we just make it do what we want and simpler? Better yet, what about just making our own - isn't that what Bitmessage / Open Transaction is doing to a point?

Dude, take a deep breath and chill ...then take a dictionary and look up "personal attack", "insult" and thelike - Do you own a cat or a dog or any other pet? Well guess what - they are parasites feeding off you. And excuse me - is your last name Mr. Ripple? He is merely expressing his opinion - there is not one personal attack (=attack on a person) or insult in his post. He has a strong opinion about what possible effect Ripple can have on Bitcoin. Whats wrong with that?

Actually - the way you react to this makes his post a lot more credible and your's a whole lot weaker - Especially since you argue that reapting things over and over without adding anything sucks and then you repeat over and over that he is arming personal attacks and insults and baseless accusations- which he is clearly not!

So as I said - chill and let people express their opinion. Just because someone disagrees with you it's not an insult, right?

If you can't deal with different opinions and critics - bitcointalk might not be the right thing for you  ;D

-SM

The only ones laughing are the ones reading that ridiculous post claiming BitStamp will be shut down within a year for being a part of a federalized payment network.

Sorry if this has already been answered, but how do I deposit and sell XRP on Bitstamp? I just tried a test deposit from Ripple.com to my Bitstamp account, but the test deposit got sent back (didn't even know that was possible).

After reading this thread all I can say is - smoothie and some other tinfoil anti-Ripple "soldiers" here are the most insecure, immature, pathetic excuses of human being I've come across here. Whenever you spew bullshit out of your little mind, to a mature reader it sounds nothing more than an awful lot of whining of sociopathic losers who didn't get enough love from their mommas. I had to avoid typing out their names and now my mouse feels dirty from copy-pasting. Ew.

But you know what? I guess that's what happens when you give someone with low intelligence and a huge ego a keyboard and lots of time. Keep putting all your energy into continuous verbal diarrhea here - it's the best contribution you'll ever make to this world. Leave the real work to the decent human beings like the rest.

Thanks for clearing up that you have no argument.