You mean up to 20%.

Everybody thinks this and tries to get in early. As a result, late comes really, really soon.

The second the volume drops, everybody knows it's not early anymore, and the volume drops to zero.

So they don't teach that it's appropriate for governments to punish apostates?

I think it's a combination of first-mover advantage, BTC being "good enough", and the ability of BTC to trade as a currency off the block chain meaning that limitations of the block chain aren't limitations on the currency.

At a minimum, they won't be processing issues or redeems until they're operating again. For the moment, the quantity of BTC assets they've issued on Ripple is locked there with no way to issue more or redeem existing ones. The price may change relative to the value of the underlying Bitcoins because of scarcity, uncertainty about when or whether Bitstamp will honor them, and so on. To some extent, you'll be able to judge confidence in Bitstamp's ability to resume operations by comparing the XRP exchange rate of BTC/Bitstamp compared to BTC/SnapSwap.

I can confirm that Bitstamp is having some kind of issue with their hot wallets and that at this time, no Bitcoin payments should be sent to any Bitstamp deposit address issued to date.

If you have a Bitcoin address that someone gave you, don't make any payments to that address until you confirm it's not an affected Bitstamp deposit address.

That's wrong. Watts is already a measure of power. Watts per hour would be a measure of the rate of change of energy consumption, which isn't relevant in any way. The 14160 number makes no sense and has no relevance either.

590 watts is, by definition, 590 joules per second. That's 50 MJ/day. A barrel of oil contains 6.1x10^9 joules, which would be enough to run a 590 watt device for 120 days (at 100% efficiency, which is not possible).

So what do you believe the appropriate penalty for apostasy is and who do you believe should impose it?

Is that really the standard these days? "I believe someone mentioned ..."

This State Department report is sobering:
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/208622.pdf

Two things to keep in mind. First, Saudi Arabia is a US ally and the State Department would like to retain the ability to persuade, so this probably understates the problem. Second, Saudi Arabia is concerned about their public relations, so they tend to be better about cases that get publicity. So you'll hear about people eventually being released or having their sentences commuted after International outcry, but the cases that didn't get attention are almost certainly much worse.

There have been no reports of executions for blasphemy or apostasy in Saudi Arabia for about 20 years. Yet they still teach their children than death is the appropriate punishment for sorcery or apostasy.

What percentage believe that anyone who converts from Islam to another religion should be killed? It's honestly hard to imagine something more extreme or violent than that.

For the very same reason we find it so useful to convert fuels into water and carbon dioxide, the reverse is not particularly useful. If you're going to produce fuel from energy, you might as well produce hydrogen -- it's more efficient and burns more cleanly.

I think we can all agree that it doesn't reflect any significant change in the fundamental value of XRP. Nothing fundamental changed. It doesn't follow that it's a pump and dump, it could be simple market momentum. But I think it's pretty obvious that any sudden, drastic increase in price that doesn't have any apparent justification is likely to be accompanied by a corresponding drop in price.

And, of course, everyone thinks they can buy in, wait for it to reach the top, and then sell out before it drops. But simple common sense will tell you that that it's impossible for everyone to make a profit if the price returns to where it was before.

Long term increases in the price of XRP benefit Ripple Labs because they allow us to sell XRP at a better price and because they are perceived as market confidence in the success of the Ripple network. To some extent, people's willingness to invest in using the Ripple network is dependent on how well they think it will do in the future and long term price increases help. But short term price increases due to momentum or manipulation inevitably followed by corresponding drops in price don't help Ripple Labs at all. The drops can send precisely the opposite signal, and the net result of a rise and drop is a weakening in the connection between the price of XRP and the long-term viability of the Ripple network.

Ripple Labs is not a short-term XRP speculator.

I believe it should work so long as payroutes continues to offer the service and you trust them not to modify the client to steal your keys or passwords. It's possible they're using our wallet service and so you will lose access to your wallet after the cutoff. I'm not sure. To be safe, everyone should be absolutely 100% certain they know their account secret well before that cutoff. That way, even if payroutes has to switch wallet providers or ceases to operate the client, you are still safe.

I believe migration to Ripple Trade will continue to be supported after the cutoff. But I presume that people are asking because they don't wish to migrate.

The ledger history is public. All ledger changes are accompanied by the cryptographically-signed transactions that justify them. All validations and proposals are signed. If Ripple Labs ever misused any power it had, there would be clear, indisputable proof that we had done so. At that point, one of two things would happen. Either other stakeholders would take over the network, possibly rewind or amend the ledger, and Ripple would continue without us, or nobody would bother and Ripple would die.

It's also important to understand that the Ripple network is only a custodian of XRP. For all other assets, there is a counterparty who actually owes you the asset. If, for example, Bitstamp owes you one Bitcoin, this is reflected on the Ripple ledger, but it is a fact independent of the existence of the Ripple network. Nothing Ripple Labs can do can make Bitstamp owe you more or fewer Bitcoins. For assets other than XRP, Ripple is just a record of obligations that actually exist independently.

Any power we have to violate expectations is just a drag on adoption because it makes it harder to rely on those expectations. And we can never actually use it. This is why increasing decentralization benefits Ripple Labs.

We can't take anything from an old wallet without the secret. And the client is open source. People who want to continue to use it still can. Payroutes, for example, has announced no plans to stop offering the old client. Far from proving Ripple is centralized, this will show precisely the reverse. Ripple Labs will stop hosting and supporting the old client, and those who like it will continue to use, offer, and support it.

They don't know your private key. You give them the public key, they give you an offset that you use to generate the private key. But they do not know the private key for the vanity address. (At least, that's how the vast majority of such sites work.)

Here's how it works:

1) You give them only a public key.

2) They give you an offset.

3) You combine the offset with your private key to get the private key for the vanity address.

4) If they had the private key to the vanity address, they could subtract the offset from it and have the private key corresponding to the public key you gave them in step 1. So if this scheme is insecure, then someone could get your private key from just your public key, which would mean ECDSA itself is insecure.

Ones that use the method I described above are safer than those that just give you the private key to the vanity address.

Manipulation that causes a price increase harms Ripple Labs because price increases due to manipulation are always followed by comparable declines. Ripple Labs is not a short term speculator in XRP.

Banks don't have interest in XRP, and we don't expect them to. They do, however, have interest in Ripple as an efficient payment system for fiat currencies. There are specific problems they have that Ripple can solve.

It's the same reason the military liking the Internet was a good thing. Ripple works better for everyone if there's significant liquidity in the network across issuers and currencies.

Let's take a step back for a second.

Ripple is basically a universal payment system where people can issue, redeem, hold, transfer, and trade arbitrary assets denominated in any currency. To make payments works, Ripple uses a pathfinding system as a kind of "matchmaker". If I hold Bitcoins and want to pay someone in dollars, the pathfinding finds some person or combination of people willing to trade US dollars for my Bitcoins. The payment takes place atomically, so there's no risk of default by an intermediate or being stuck with an intermediary asset. This makes all the liquidity usable.

When we designed Ripple, we basically threw away everything we knew about how the financial system actually worked and designed a completely generic platform for assets. We took the public database with cryptographically signed transactions arbitrated without the need for a central authority from Bitcoin.

You can use Ripple as a payment system without knowing anything about XRP. You just need a very small amount of XRP to cover reserves and pay transaction fees. We expect $10 worth to cover a typical account's needs for many years. We hope that XRP will be useful as an intermediary asset. XRP has no counterparty and can flow between any two account. Other assets on Ripple have a counterparty (the issuer of the asset) and can only be held by those who have agreed to trust that counterparty.

A key difference between Ripple and other systems where a counterparty holds your assets is that people who have chosen different counterparties can still freely pay each other. When you use PayPal, you trust PayPal to hold your dollars and pay you out when you receive payments. But you can also only make payments to and from people who similarly trust PayPal. With Ripple, I can choose to trust SnapSwap to hold my dollars, but freely make payments to and from people who have no relationship with SnapSwap whatsoever.

Are you saying that increasing the supply of XRP increases the price? That seems to fly in the face of basic economics. Are you saying people are reliably fooled by big numbers on coinmarketcap into thinking the price is rising when it's not and that makes the price rise? That is, I guess, possible, but I certainly don't believe it's significant.

The short term price of XRP really is not that important to Ripple Labs. To some extent, it's seen as a measure of the health of the company and to some extent our success may depend on what people perceive our chances of major success are. But increases in price based on manipulation or misinformation are almost always going to be followed by comparable drops in price. If we like the message price increases signal, it follows that we don't like the message price drops signal. Ripple Labs is not a short term speculator in XRP.

There certainly are short term speculators in XRP who have an incentive to manipulate the price to buy low and sell high. But Ripple Labs is not one of them and their actions hurt us at least as much as they help us. We'd prefer a stable price to a sharp rise followed by a comparable drop.

I don't think there's any way to trick or manipulate the market into an increase in price that won't be followed by a similar decrease. And I don't think such increases or decreases are always due to manipulation because momentum trading alone can do it as well.

You're welcome to disagree with me, of course, but I share my views freely and openly and always try to explain why I hold these views. I don't appreciate unfounded accusations of dishonesty. I'm very open to contrary views and always willing to change my opinions based on evidence or argument. I fully recognize that I could be wrong about this and basically, my position is essentially that market prices in the absence of real changes to asset fundamentals are basically just chaos.