Bitcoin Forum

Ripple is supposedly going open source on the 26th.  Is it possible to have miners instead of relying on a few people to distribute pre-mined coins?

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I don't think so. They already planned to giveaway some coins, and sell the others.
Open source or not does not matter.

As soon as they release the code we will know if it's mineable or it using some other method.

Well, unless they change it, the original plan was it to not be minable.  There will be nodes that will work on consensus and verifying transactions but no PoW mining. 

Then it must be it's something similar to TimeKoin or eMunie.

Hash Crunching Idiots. -satoshi

I suppose it is very much possible to replicate the whole Ripple system based on mining, without pre-mined XRP. All you need is a lottery mechanism to distribute XRP to nodes participating in consensus-building. Instead of proof of work (as in Bitcoin and its alts), such network would require proof of consensus (POC) from all participating nodes. Roughly, the more each node is in agreement with the rest of network, the higher its chances to win in the lottery.

Exact mechanism to enact such lottery needs to be worked out, but this task is not unsurmountable. New coins release schedule could be structured in a similar way to Bitcoin, using (possibly gradually) diminishing scale. This way, XRP-equivalent will be issued in a predictable manner, preventing the uncertainty and the need to trust central authority that is the bane of ripple.com scheme.

In all other respects, such system may 100% replicate Ripple functionality, use Ripple protocols and Ripple client/server software. That is, until "OpenCoin" starts enforcing its hidden copyrights, patents, intentionally break compatibility and whatnot against such a competitor that would surely force them out of business otherwise.

Necro-thread.  :)

That whole open-source thing for Ripple.... kind of flopped on the news cycle, huh. Is anyone even working on a clone of Ripple, or have people forgotten about it entirely?

Do you mean Ripple-like systems in general, or ripple.com specifically? Ripple is yet unproven, but still interesting idea of a community-based credit system, with many potential benefits. ripple.com is a proprietary implementation of this system that many people find deeply flawed, to the point of being unusable. It does not mean that a better system could not be implemented.


Well, initial posts failed to produce a meaningful answer to a very direct question. I find this question quite interesting and claim some technical expertise on the matter (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150447). So I did my best to address it. It's not like the situation with Ripple changed much in the last month, so I hope OP may still find my answer somewhat useful.

In case you didn't notice, in the last month the source code for rippled, the only component that was not publicly available with an Open Source license got published.

In case you didn't notice, SSL's web of trust is implemented in an open source manner however it's still de facto centralized.

Which does nothing to change the fact that ripple.com is inherently a centralized and proprietary system, with de-facto and de-jure unlimited control by Ripple Labs (nee OpenCoin). Built around a proprietary currency 100% pre-issued, arbitrarily distributed and continuously "managed" by Ripple Labs.

I am not too sure if you mean the same by "centralized", "unlimited control" and "proprietory" as I do...

If you dislike it, just fork it and build your own, better network. Same as with SSL - you can easily issue certificates yourself or with Bitcoin (we are in the Altcoin section after all, where far ofer 90% of "coins" are just simple forks) as well. If you are not using tha Satoshi chain, you can even run with the exact same rules and still not send any money to anyone claiming to accept "Bitcoin".

I read in quite a few threads that Ripple will be immediately forked as the idea behind the system is good but the implementation with XRP (or the distribution of these) sucks. Well, so far I have yet to even see any large fork on github. Even in the Open Source announcements the possibility of forks is mentioned.

Such emotion-loaded language is for some reason often used by people promoting XRP and ripple.com on these forums. I wonder why is that? Failing to find technical and rational arguments, maybe? Or, perhaps, attempt to "re-define" very real problems and issues out of existence is so much easier than addressing them?

No, I got from you:
This is your private opinion, not a fact, unless backed by arguments or reasons.
I am of a very differnt opinion in a lot of these points, on the other hand I fear I'd waste the time of both of us if I start now discussing everything in detail and I honestly don't see the point, just as I don't preach about Bitcoin to people who think it's a scam. Over time they will learn by themselves that it is not or it is a failure anyways.

Also I do certainly NOT promote XRP, a currency that I like for its idea (acting as path shortener in Ripple) but that I would certainly not promote like Bitcoin.

OpenBong exploited the Bitcoin community to bootstrap Ripple...
And basically stands in opposition to everything Satoshi believed.

Also, every single business in the Ripple ecosystem is a money loser...
(Except the Ripple Principals who win-win at others' expense)...
So everybody on that side it always testy.

Also XRP is down > 50% since "open source"...
And as the Ripple Apologist mentioned, no one is forking Ripple...
Zero interest... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Flop of the year, baby... compare to MCX = hit of the year.

OK, let's try to be objective here. Which part of "100% pre-issued", "arbitrarily distributed", "continuously managed" "proprietary currency" you consider my opinion rather than a simple statement of a fact?

"100% pre-issued": Agreed, though Ripple is not XRP.

"arbitrarily distributed": Kinda agreed, not completely arbitrarily (Bitcoin is/was being FAR more arbitrarily distributed). I don't see the bad side of this though.

"continuously managed": Well, only with consensus of the community, like Bitcoin. As RipleLabs holds still a supermajority of XRP, they can devalue the currency at will, act and trade accordingly.

"proprietary currency": I'm not too sure what you mean by that, probably that only one entity controls a lot of it and initially controlled all of it? Again, you confuse "Ripple" with "XRP.


Also what you didn't repeat but what I far less agree with are the following statement(s):
"Which does nothing to change the fact that ripple.com is inherently a centralized and proprietary system, with de-facto and de-jure unlimited control by Ripple Labs (nee OpenCoin)."

"centralized system": Currently, still quite true, as there are few validators besides RL that I added to my UNL. This can and will change though and it already is far less centralized than any other exchange out there, including Localbitcoins with their escrow (=IOU) function.

"proprietary system": Again, I'm not too sure what you mean by that. Every piece of code to bootstrap and run your own Ripple system is available under Open Source licenses. Yes, Ripple is mainly developed by Ripple Labs, that does not make them proprietary. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software - maybe you mean "commercial" instead?)

"de-facto unlimited control": For one single instance of fraud, yes. They can probably (with quite a bit of effort) produce a ledger that suddenly does anything they want. This is maybe even true to a larger extent than BTC mining pools doing a huge double spend or rewriting a part of history. It will also have an even larger influence on their trustworthiness and likely sums that were stolen that way wouldn't be released by gateways, similar to the hacking incident at MtGox some time ago. After RL prooved themselves untrustworthy, Ripple would be more or less dead I guess. Combine that with the high chance that IOUs can NOT be redeemed if they screw something up (the only asset in Ripple are XRP, IOUs depend on counter parties! There is no need to steal XRP for RL, as they own far too many of them anyways...) and I personally would say they have a lower incentive to cheat or game the system than e.g. mining pools in BTC (who have only to play by the rules because miners are likely also a bit emotional about how their money is made - if they weren't there woudl be some serious issues in Bitcoinland, like pools gaming Satoshi's dice...)

"de-iure unlimited control": It is Open Source. I don't know too much about this american idiocy of patenting software, but I doubt that this would be enforceable after releasing the software into the public with a license that says: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.".

Here is how our friend Google defines proprietary: "(of a product) marketed under and protected by a registered trade name."

Let's look into Ripple Labs TOS (I bolded relevant parts for your convenience):

Both Ripple and XRP are Ripple Labs product/service names and therefore proprietary. According to https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2662, OpenCoin/RippleLabs is actively wielding its trademarks to prevent other people from using it, such as their legal action to quench the use of "Ripple Card" by other company. They do not have any clear policy on permissible use of their trademarks (one may assume intentionally), so there is no reason to believe they won't wield their legal ammo once again to kill anything that even remotely competes with their proprietary system.

Still wondering why no one puts his efforts into building "Ripple alternative" using their "open source software"?  

Well, I thought of extending Ripple to be used as back-end to a site like inputs.io or similar, working title "Cripple" (centralized Ripple). No, this is not sarcasm, there could be some benefits actually to this.

What more people wanted to see I think was a Ripple system that uses BTC instead of XRP for transaction fees and as market central currency - which would slow it down to Bitcoin speeds (if you don't accept 0-conf transactions, which is recommendable - but accepting them might be possible if you have many validators that all must have this transaction in their transaction list in Bitcoin + miners publishing the transactions they will include).

As Ripple by itself only gains traction because of its gateways, my guess is that the replacement of XRP with BTC itself is not too much of an issue to convince gateways to support this "Bitripple" fork, especially if it also has some downsides. Time will tell, maybe there are already some people working in secret on that? Publicly, I haven't seen anything on github at least...

Is Ripple still around?  They seemed to want to put a lot of effort into marketing it at the beginning, and then it just died out, thought they gave up on it or something.

They seem to market far less towards bitcoiners nowadays... more towards the other ~99.9% of the population. ;)

It is definitely around, very much alive and has probably more code written per week than all the altcoins in this forum together in a month. It works amazingly well for Bitcoins, a gateway recently added Google wallet so you can now buy XRP (that can be converted to BTC then) with credit cards for ~5% fee flat for example. I usually just simply use them and try to not preach or convince people around here of anything (it didn't work when Bitcoin was viewed as ponzi scam, why should it work for Ripple?) and just help or clear confusion (like the infamous "if A trusts B and B trusts C, A trusts C!!111" - which is simply wrong, as trust is not transitive!).

Server (in C++): https://github.com/ripple/rippled
Client (in Javascript): https://github.com/ripple/ripple-client
Library for talking to the server in JS: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib
(since Friday) Java client library: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib-java

Also their new website is kinda neat, including a live ticker of transactions etc.

Anyways, they are definitely not dying out and are also still expanding their team, currently being one of the larger companies that came from Bitcoin at this point I guess.

This may actually be a valid application for this technology - centrally controlled, but possibly distributed payment backend. Leaving no doubt among its users that there is a central administrator and a single point of failure. However, to market this technology as a kind of "decentralized payment network", like RL used to - this is just a great misstatement of facts, bordering on dishonesty, IMHO.

If I was a developer of such system, though, I'd be very worried about Ripple Labs aggressive legal stance towards "imitators" - see TOS.

Well, Ripple itself IS a decentralized payment network, not a centralized one (that would be only true after my patches - project is at the time on hold though, as it would require disabling too much functionality to work for my use case... simpler solutions work better with centralized systems).

As I said "Cripple" is only the working title, I would ask anyways beforehand or just use a different name, like "inputts"... and I don't really see why I should be "very worried" about a company's ToS halfway around the globe. ;)

By the way - Bitcoin is trademarked too and owned by MtGox.

Once they start marketing any product under this trademark and enforcing their trademark against others, like RippleLabs does, I'll call their product/service proprietary as well. Since this did not happen yet, and unlikely to happen in future, I really fail to see any parallels here.

Ripple sounded interesting at first, but after a while there was just too much "opportunity cost" in waiting day after day after day for the code.

So I pretty much had to forget about it and move on to other things.

That applies both to all the gateways I wanted to set up and to the various people who were interested in the possibility of being able to run their own currency without the vulnerabilities of a blockchain.

Sure some day month year or decade I'll likely get around to looking at it again but now other things have been taken up so there just isn't spare time to screw around with Ripple, plus of course the whole delay delay delay crap put a bad smell on the whole thing that leads to even wondering whether what they finally did release will turn out to actually work.

(Afterall as far as I know the gateway code included still isn't fit for real use, is it?)

-MarkM-

I expect more interest to return to Ripple following open-source ... kind of a disappointment!  :-\

Well no hurry eh, they took forever to release it so now we can take forever to get around to reacting to that fact. :)

-MarkM-

I think OpenCoin/RippleLabs decision to keep source code closed for so long did themselves a great disservice. By the time they eventually open sourced it to great fanfare, they've already acquired hard-to-fix negative rep among both FOSS and Bitcoin communities. Most developers who would be interested in working with this code lost interest and moved on to other projects. If OC did not lose their FOSS cred from the very beginning, developer interest may lead to further adoption and powerful momentum. None of it seems likely at the moment, with ripple.com more or less a ghost town by now. With number of active users, volume of transactions and trade amount not only stagnant, but even falling compared to earlier periods.

I've used to develop a command line client for Ripple: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150447. It is not supported any longer, but should be still functional for most simple use cases.

If you did any serious trading on Ripple, you'd have your own rippled + local client for better performance anyways (and you'd use the API, not the client...). On one hand people complain that it is "dead", on the other hand official servers are overloaded.

If you use Ubuntu, there is a PPA available with rippled binaries too, so you don't even need to wait the 2 minutes it takes to build.