Bitcoin Forum

Ripple seems providing feasible solutions that bitcoin probably has, and sounds pretty promising.

However, when it comes to reserve half of XRP for themselves, Ripple show its myopia. So little a size of economy they are looking forward to, that they're trying to grap HALF of it!

Sigh, a tiny mind can never have a tremendous achievement.

If I started OpenCoin, I'd reserve nothing, and if I were determined to raise its value, the simplest choice would be buying XRP myself from the very beginning.

This problem exists because the only way for OpenCoin to make profit is to sell the xrp when its value is rising. They thus have to keep a certain proportion of xrp in reserve, also aiming to manipulate the price of xrp...

Because Bitcoin was made by someone who was in it for the profit, right?

Because Linux was made by someone who was in it for the profit, right?

Ripple is a dirty cash grab.

Ripple - Ripplescamcoin = Better Ripple

Just release the source code already, I don't want to use XRP.

yet again more useless threads showing a lack of understandin of what ripple is all about.

best analogy i have found to describe it
ripple is like the postal service sending transactions (cheques/checks) in the mail to each other where everyone knows a cheque is not the actual money, but just a IOU/request for bank(exchange) to authorise payment you person named on the cheque on behalf of person B and XRP is simply the postage stamped envelope used to send the transaction.

yet everyone just see's XRP as an alt coin. avoiding the actual purpose of ripple

EG

convert bitcoin for FIAT where it costs a smal decimal of a single XRP. meaning that if you have 500xrp you can do many many transactions before needing to buy more XRP(stamps).

only the mega exchanges need hoards of XRP to do many dolar to euro, euro to yen, dollar to bitcoin, transactions..  the whole btc to xrp transactions should only be needed as often as someone goes to a post office to buy 500 stamps.. so please please realise the true purpose of ripple and stop complaining about XRP as if was always intended to be an alt.

once people start using ripple for its intended purpose XRP will be worth pennies. but i fear ripple as s payment utility will be ignored and XRP will continue to be traded as purely a altcoin against other coins directly..

which leaves me to face palm alot of community members that still don't even read the descriptions of programs and use them for their desired functions.

This is a troll thread. OP doesn't know what he's talking about.

I see this repeated by the supporters of Opencoin's Ripple again and again, but I do not see how this is true. From the wiki:


How can they claim XRP are worthless stamps on the one hand, but then on the other hand they are somehow valuable enough to fund their business? The Opencoin guys MUST be realizing that their XRP do have value (something like 2 cent per XRP at the moment) and that they are traded and used like a currency right now. How can they just ignore that and claim XRP are basically worthless and not a currency? On Reddit it was even mentioned that a VPN service is already accepting XRP as payment. I don't know about the US, but in my country stamps are used like a currency. If you buy things from the post office, they give you your change in stamps. You also get change back in stamps when sending cash to certain mailorder services (less weight than metal coins).

The drastic increase in XRP value during the last weeks is in my opinion a direct result of Opencoin's position as the equivalent of a "XRP central bank". They have nearly complete control over the supply. With demand being as high as it is at the moment, their restriction of the supply makes the price of XRP shoot up. The price of XRP is basically completely in Opencoin's hands and completely dependent on Opencoin's goodwill, they can make it go in whatever direction pleases them. Why should a for-profit company not abuse such a position? I am extremely distrustful of their intentions, and would urge anyone who intends to use their system (which makes using XRP mandatory) to be very cautious.

Pretty much.

Even if it's debatable if the Better Ripple end is above or below epsilon, it's still undebatable that Ripple - Ripplescamcoin = Better Ripple.

Noticing the elaborate sidestepping employed by people obviously attached to the Ripplescamcoin part and paid for it (such as (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201794.msg2251642#msg2251642)) I'd guess there's absolutely no chance of this happening: never will Ripplescamcoin give up (until the venture capital runs out at least); nobody will reimplement Ripple w/o the scam because Better Ripple actually is below epsilon and thus not worth it.

Life in a free world: scamming and lying no longer reserved exclusively for the government; open to the public instead. Learn to love it I guess.


It's not at all that they don't realize. They do realize, as they took the deliberate step to waste some Bitcoin (bought for PayPal's venture dollars) in order to artificially increase the XRP exchange rate (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/ripple-the-definitive-discussion/#comment-93299) to a point where they can claim "looky, Ripple mkt cap > Bitcoin mkt cap". They figured this would somehow bring in more love, not more scrutiny.

To get a sample of that shitfest:




(from obscure blogs nobody cares about nominally)

So then: whatever business strategists Ripple hired gave them the uniquely bad advice of trying to push up the price, oblivious to the fact that such an attempt will indisputably cement XRP's position among the known pump scams like Novacoin, rather than among the humble Bitcoin just-in-case substitutes like LTC. Bad move.

(An aside for Venture Idiots: submit already! Pay the fees of the actually competent (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/the-future-of-bitcoin-regulation/). This thing where you're hiring the retarded but accessible is only going to continue the trend where you're being publicly humiliated. You're not "saving money", and you sure as hell can't even begin to "shape the field".)

the same way the postal service can say that stamps are not a currency yet that is their method  of getting paid, by people buying stamps. then look at the profit and loss sheets of the postal services of your native country. and you will start coming to the arguments MPOE-PR is coming up with

the point is instead of using ripple as its intended use, a peer to peer exchange for bitcoins to fiat between people and exchanges like bitstamp...much like sending a cheque through a postal service, everyone is using it just to buy and sell the stamps between each other(xrp). as if the stamp/xrp is more important then the service ripple/postal service offer.

yea a postal stamp is worth a few pennys when you go buy them at a postal service. but that is not the whole point of a postal service. a postal service does not exist purely to sell postal stamps,  its just its method of getting paid for the actual service it offers

ripple does not exist purely to sell ripple, its just its method of getting paid for the actual service it offers

ripple is not selling you a product, its a service (peer to peer exchange)... xrp are only important for the transmission of the requests for bitcoin-fiat. the sooner people see that XRP is not an altcoin the better.

The funny part here is, of course,

http://www.biography.com/imported/images/Biography/Images/Profiles/P/Charles-Ponzi-20650909-1-402.jpg

These "stamps" are, in essence, a deflationary cryptocurrency. They are being used as currency, and I see no reason why they will not be continued to be used as currency in the future. I refuse to believe that Opencoin did not see right away that their XRP actually can and will be used as currency. What about the various reports from multiple users (on Reddit and here) who claimed to have spoken with Opencoin employees (e.g. at the conference), who basically admitted that it is their business model to expect XRP to become more popular as a currency, and to eventually take away a significant marketcap from Bitcoin? Maybe these are all TradeFortress sockpuppets in disguise, but IMO this is basically the only logical outcome if Opencoin's Ripple becomes popular - why transfer monetary value with Bitcoin IOUs when XRP serve the same purpose? Again, I refuse to believe that Opencoin did not consider that as a possible scenario, that could potentially bring them (as a for-profit company and as the holders of a majority of all XRP) massive profits.

XRP is a currency:

https://i.imgur.com/ZugZb4O.png (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=211068.msg2213146#msg2213146)

Ok, I just discovered this interview with Chris Larsen (Co-founder and CEO of Opencoin), and he explicitly talks about XRPs as a fixed-amount currency competing with Bitcoins.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=3SBzhXpxBhA#t=362s

I think that should be reason enough to stop saying that XRP are not intended by Opencoin to be used as a currency?!

Not sure if serious..

Like I said. XRP is a currency!

XRP is designed to be an intermediary facilitating the flow in and out of other currencies. Calling it a currency or a stamp is over-simplifying.

Q: How is Ripple a Ponzi if: A - XRP are given away, and B - There's a finite supply?
A: It has absolutely nothing in common with a Ponzi.

It's harder and more pointless for vultures to hoard XRP. That's what a lot of the fuss is about imo.
Not enough of us on bitcointalk discuss the impacts of technologies in the real world. What Ripple offers is huge.

You're new here are you?


How is it anything else.

 ::)

You have no argument other than: Ponzi has something to do with stamps, and some people say Ripple is like stamps. Gimme a break, what is this, grade 10?

They are giving the XRP away in order to grow the infrastructure of a distributed currency exchange.

Where do they do that?

Instead of trusting FEDs, there are people who somehow figure it's a better idea to trust a private corporation which is ten times more shady and arbitrary than FED with the currency they created ....wow. ::)


Had Bitcoin been like XRP, I would have sticked with whatever fiats I use.

It is essentially broken because you have to trust the the party to pay the IOU actually does so.

Trust-based system.

The trick is to get merchant to accept ripple into their system and also to get gateways (i.e. banks and other financial instutitions) to accept them as well ...which are subject to regulation and being shut down essentially taking your XRP/IOUs with it.

This is somewhat true with bitcoin , but you have the ability to hold your own bitcoins. Ripple is centralized.


OpenCoin is very misleading with their name and what they have said about ripple. It is not open sourced nor is it decentralized.

OpenCoin holds a fuckton of XRP.

Their justification is: "WEll we need to hire the best programmers blah blah blah"

But what they really are saying is "we need to make sure our VCs get their pay off as well as us". So please use XRP so it goes up in value so we can get rich quick for little effort.

Bullshit. May as well use the Federal Reserve system already.

Ripplers whining:" You totally misunderstood us! It's not what Ripple is all about!" Blahblahblah....

What Satoshi did--throwing in the code and the whitepaper:" Show me where it would't work the way I told you, I dare you."

It's impossible to have a rational discussion so early. Some of you have hitched your wagons prematurely to the "I simply don't care about Ripple" ideology imho. I guess you don't see the new utilities it's attempting to bring to the payment space as being as much of a big deal as some of us do.

I've said this before, but it's important to keep in mind, the payment space is MASSIVE! Bitcoin is a little speck. Bitcoin, Ripple, and wtvr else we're talking about in these forums that actually possesses forward momentum is the new stuff, and it all supports itself.

Had they really focused on working on a payment system(certainly not without major problems), they would not be despised so much, instead they create a currency that makes FED pales in comparison when it comed to scamability, then advertise it as if they only keep enough to reward their self-proclaimed great contributions.

Do not forget using VC money to buy up the tiny XRPs they gave away so they would have a bigger market cap.. to attract more VCs.

The network requires XRP to have a value in order to combat spam. The price of XRP today is 99% speculative, but it's gradually becoming more real. Over time this value will increasingly be set by a new payment processing market.

Ripple can give everyone the ability to transact for free in any currency they want. OpenCoin has nothing in common with the FED. lol

Why Bitcoiners don't embrace it is beyond me. The only reason I can think of is that they assume that undermining Ripple will somehow delay the day Bitcoin is inevitably replaced by something better. It's not a rational assumption. It has everything to do with fear and greed, and nothing to do with Ripple.


I'm sure OpenCoin will attract a lot of VCs. What's your point?

Why you can't wrap your mind around the facts is beyond me, and how Ripplers attribute this to envy is even more laughable.

The fact is that the only reason Bitcoin network doesn't do instant confirmation is the unfairness of distribution and security, had the miners needed not to worry about their blocks getting rejected, because all coins are generated in the genesis block anyway(like what Opencoin is doing), Bitcoin network could just have gone the WDC way by adjusting the block generation time to something like 10 or 20 seconds, and we would have near-instant confirmations without putting up with Ripple's half-assed consensus system, you really think Ripple is superior in anyway?

Fairness is everything, I wil tell you why I don't embrace it, ask any proper investor outside of this community about something like XRP, they will tell you it is suicidal to invest in something which a single entity controls 10 times more than anyone else combined, and count on their good will to make money for you, needless to say there is no way for you to investigate if the currency is being manipulated or not, heck, you don't even know how much XRP is out of Opencoin.

Had Opencoin really honored fairness and felt the need to combat spam, there are much better approaches to take, like a deterministic system which releases XRPs, while keeping the 300 XRPs limit in place(yeah, they get rid of it already), not to say the so-called "spam" problem is something unique to the Ripple, which says much about how good the design actually is.

If you still feel confused, ask yourself, where is Ripple/XRP better than the financial/federal reserve system you are using?

But nevermind, it's not the first time I see a Rippler who just can't swallow rational arguments.

Oh, just to quickly jump in:
Bitcoin has SERIOUS issues with spam transactions and is running currently in a heavily limited mode because of that.

Bitcoin would look much different (imho better + with far more features), if it somehow could be ensured that spam transactions are not mined into the block chain. One of the biggest reasons that this hasn't happened yet, is (aside from being distributed already, so hardforks need mining power) that there is no clear consensus what "spam" exactly is.

Ripple solves this via a combination of Proof of Stake (or maybe Proof of Ownership) and Proof of Destruction.


XRP are used (or probably intended to be used) as an intermediate currency/token/whateveryoucallit. Just like it is easier to give an USD value to several computer parts and compare this instead of calculating how many ASUS ... mainboards I have to trade for 3 Intel core-i5 ... CPUs it is intended to be used for comparisons and facilitating trade. Same goes for using BTC at the moment by the way - as most goods and services can be valued in fiat and this fiat value can be translated into a BTC value, BTC are used as an intermediate, just like USD or EUR or BTN - the main use for money after all.

A Ripple system without an internal currency will need to adopt another currency out of necessity really fast, it could be Litecoins, it could be Bitcoin it can be something else. Without any internal currency, there can only be barter trade of IOUs and that leads to highly inefficient markets.

As there is no real need to actually USE XRP (just as I never had to use Mexican Pesos in my whole life, still I can calculate the value of nearly anything around me in Mexican Pesos!) but it is useful to have it around, so I'm not so much concerned with the whole issues that people see around this.

XXX billions XRP on your account anyways just means that you can dump the price - as long as you don't invest in them by holding and just use them to facilitate trade (meaning you do trade for example PayPalUSD --> XRP --> BTC instead of longer paths) you're not exposed to this at all.

To be clear, I am also heavily against investing in XRP (I just hold the ones I got for free and axchanged a few of them to BTC to get a better feeling for the client and system) and would recommend anyone who buys them to exchange them quickly for wheatever IOU they want to have and redeem that at the time they want to.

I don't know what you mean by "spam transactions"? The problem of blockchain being filled up with too many small transactions I guess? I don't see how Ripple can solve it, the ledger can still bloat, at least with its current design.

I agree with a lot of what you said about XRPs, but what I find faults with is the way they release them, which is completely arbitrary and opaque, rather then the fact that they created a currency itself. Even if they were really out of other reasonable solutions, and had to settle with the "printing press" model(which I strongly doubt, at bare minimum they can be as transparent as FEDs and give people complete, provable data about the past/current/future rate and fluctuation of XRPs' flow into the network. All this ultra-secrecy can only lead people to be more and more suspicious that some foul plays are behind the door.

Just sain' Satoshi also generated a bunch of Bitcoins for himself.

Keyword ^


Ripple = type 1 and 0's into variable.

Big difference.

This is getting old, the difference is Satoshi essentially informed everyone he talked to to mine Bitcoins, and the soruce code was released before the genesis block was even mined, someone took his advice, like Hal Finney, who mined several thousand very early, did Opencoin ever give anyone a chance to take their reserved portion of XRPs which they created out of thin air? Not to say that a Bitcoin network can only be "alive" as long as at least a miner is running, so Satoshi had to be that miner himself, because no one else wanted to do that, while Ripple network, by design, can work perfectly without XRPs.

Technically yes, but for practical purposes the cost of generating them stands in no relation to the effort it took to come up with Bitcoin and write the software.
The general consensus is that Satoshi has "earned" to have them not because his mining but because his work.

All you can say that you think opencoin is too greedy for your taste. In that case you are free to fork ripple once it is released.
As for myself I consider the valuation of XRP to work like a stock which pay "dividends" by deflation. Added to this I didn't give anybody any money nor did I pay for my XRP, which I gonna keep till ripple comes out of beta.
Haters gonna hate,

You know what, you could have mined all those 1 million bitcoins, and leave not even bread crumbs to Satoshi, this is called "fairness".

And I don't hate XRPs, I just think it's a suckers' investment, you can ask any investor out of this community if they are going to invest in something which a single entity controls 10 times more than everyone else combined, they will call you crazy.

Well, I hold ~50k XRP that I did not create for myself but that I got as an "early adopter" for free which I consider "my portion of XRPs".

Satoshi on the other hand probably mostly mined at a loss or completely voluntarily, as there was for quite some time no way at all to spend BTC anywhere. Just like the famous "10k BTC pizza" which was sold under value at that time by the way.

I already saw some threads about forking Ripple to remove XRP - please just make sure to include some other kind of non-IOU currency in there (which as I said could be Bitcoin/Litecoin/...coin), a Ripple system without an intermediate currency will search for one and if that intermediate currency turns out to be a heavily centralized IOU, there are even more issues than with XRP, which at least are not IOUs.

I agree that the distribution of XRP is one of the main issues I see in Ripple too, on the other hand they are so cheap to begin with that this is a rather philosophical concern. I would be happy if all I would ever need to pay to make millions of transactions in the future on a payment network would only cost me a 1/10th of what I pay for my credit card per year alone.

If I did know about and were subscribed to the cypherpunks mailing list, had the knowledge to implement a miner and the necessary computing resources.

I agree that XRP are risky, it's the same kind of risk as with BTC just amplified, but I think the potential gain is there to compensate. If I am wrong, well it's like missing on somebody giving me 1000 bucks, which is unfortunate but not really dramatic.

If a train is about to leave, it would be fair enough for the train operator to put the timetable at somewhere publicly visible, they have no duty to pay big bucks to the post office to have the table mailed to everyone's home, in fact, I doubt if they had done that, you would probably still had thrown it into the trashcan, consider it spam-mail.

"Fairness" is about you do as much as you can, with your current resource, to get the access to your currency out to as many people as possible, Opencoin can at the blink of an eye start giving away all of their XRPs(or even better, sell them!), yet they refuse to do that.

Well If opencoin gives away this many XRP not only they gonna run out sooner than it would take for ripple to become popular, but also the wealth would be concentrated within this community which I don't think they want.

Or probably they should have designed differently, at least making a valid attempt at fairness so that people can be confident that they are in for the betterment of the network, rather than "pump and dump", right now it just look dodgy in every way.

I think that Ripple has the potential to be very big - and I'm sure that many on these forums agree, and that's exactly why we are criticizing it so harshly, because many bitcoiners do not like a future in which Ripple has achieved widespread adoption.

Leaving aside the fatal flaws (trust and debt) inherent also to the conventional financial system, the premine of Ripple's crypto (XRP) it is also a huge drawback.

From one side inflation is built into Bitcoin to pay miners which actively work for the network, and this system has demonstrated to be rock solid in the past 3 years, as it also creates a strong "real" economy related to the core function of the currency, all of which strengthens the network. On the contrary, I can't really get what will be the incentive of validators to participate in the Ripple network if there is no mining whatsoever (never seen a real explanation on this point).

From the other side, the fact that Opencoin controls ALL the XRP feels like a very opportunistic way to profit from Bitcoin's genius idea, while taking out from the equation many of the Bitcoin revolutionary aspects. Joel seems to agree that trust-based system=bad money, and he says he hopes that Ripple will be just a first step towards a "trust-free" monetary future. Unfortunately this is a complete fallacy because they will do whatever suits them best with the whole supply of the "trust-free" currency inside Ripple. What I mean is that you actually need to put a lot of trust in Opencoin to use XRP, because that level of premining and general lack of transparency de facto kills the decentralized and trust-free concepts.

Everything has the potential to be very big. Farts for instance. When you sit down to take a shit, the doogie has the potential to be very big. So what of it? What difference does it make that you take one large dump or a few smaller ones? Other than, you know, the former might be a little painful.


Your statement was:


Do you even know what the fuck words mean at all?

That aside: the idea is that you can acquire these "stamps" for next to nothing in some place and then redeem them for more later. This is the engine driving whatever scrawny speculation is occuring in XRP, other than the insiders pumping it up (http://polimedia.us/trilema/2013/ripple-the-definitive-discussion/).

There's no value, utility or convenience delivered by Ripple. Perhaps there will be at some future point, but almost certainly not by a system run by the current people involved (it's very amusing to note how pretty much all Bitcoin's ambitious failures, from Caleb to Katz gravitate towards this new thing, in the ultimately vain hope that they were pushed aside in Bitcoin for any other reason than because they're stupid, worthless failures).

Money in ripple system is debt money... We already have that in the world! IT SUCKS!

XRP in ripple are only sound money. Ripple is centralized and closed source. It has yet to prove itself. We need to wait for them to open source fully.

Where? When? What dimension do you speak of?

Ripple is imho a huge success so far, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. You have a screwed up opinion of the value of past failures. Talk to any successful innovator and they will tell you of failures leading to success.

You make it sound like XRP is hard to come by. Go buy some for cheap if you want some for some reason.

Meh. I trust them today, and maybe if we don't trust them tomorrow we fork the network and roll on with some sort of Ripple 3.0. I'm mostly concerned with what can make the world a better place right now. Not so much about "fairness" according to the Bitcoin community (lol), minor technical issues, or speculation about what technology might exist in the future.