Would you mind explaining the 2 of 2 party escrow, compared to the normal escrow agent option? The diagram is not very clear on that. I also like the fact that it's using the Tor network to add some privacy, but it will once again turn into a Silkroad scene. 

Please explain. ^clueless^

I'm not so sure about 2 party escrow. Having to put money upfront for each trades might be pretty annoying but that's interesting and might work nonetheless. OpenBazaar will offer more escrow options though.

I'm seeing a lot of Ripple-hating around this, but I think (1) it's interesting and (2) open standards are a good thing. If I'm visualizing it correctly, it's a way to communicate separate ledgers and networks. That's pretty cool.

I Broke Bitcoin

Alister Maclin can break Bitcoin on command. In an email, Maclin said he's been the one spamming the Bitcoin network over the last several days with enough force to compel a Bitcoin exchange to notify its customers that the attack was causing withdrawal issues. Of course, he added, "Alister Maclin" is an alias.

In retrospect, I should have been more specific when I asked Maclin if there was a way for me to verify his claims.

Normally, confirmation of this kind might come in the form of a cryptographic fingerprint, but when I contacted Maclin over email, he replied in broken English: “I will switch the stress-test on once again for a short period (~10 min) at 17:30 of your local time (there is 00:22 now in Moscow - I wanna sleep). You will see.”

Slightly taken aback, I asked if Maclin meant 5:30 PM tomorrow. “Today! Now! I've already started it ten minutes ago ” he replied. Sure enough, the number of transactions rejected by the Bitcoin network skyrocketed at 5:30 PM on Tuesday afternoon.



At 5:54 PM, Maclin emailed me again. “Switched off,” he wrote. “Now red lines on the third chart will return back to green.” And as it was written, so it was done. Things calmed down, the number of rejected transactions dropped back to normal levels, and the chart’s red spike settled back to green after an hour.



Maclin isn’t the first person to try and break the Bitcoin network. An exchange called Coinwallet.eu previously threw $48,000 USD in Bitcoin to the winds in an attempt to fill the network with tiny spam transactions and slow things down for everyone. By comparison, however, Maclin’s attack was extremely cheap, simple, and effective.

Maclin used what’s known as a “malleability attack,” which takes advantage of the time delay between when bitcoins are sent and when the transaction record is included in a block and uploaded to the blockchain for posterity. A script written by Maclin, running on a virtual machine, captures transactions and re-broadcasts them to the Bitcoin network with a slightly different ID, thus creating a duplicate transaction, only one of which can be added to a block. Everybody’s bitcoins still get where they need to go, but it could take hours for the transaction to be confirmed instead of the usual 10 minutes... (cont.'d)

Can anyone prove this "IBM Adept" is still in development?  Paul Brody, who was head of the project, resigned and hasn't worked at IBM since December and does nothing with Ethereum anymore.  I can't seem to find any details or updates about IBM Adept except from really old articles, press releases written by Ethereum staff or posts from Ethereum Developers.  

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pbrody

When the last real updates were from January 2015, I am assuming by now IBM Adept has been canned or shutdown.


http://dapps.ethercasts.com/

There's only 13 working demos and most of the stuff on this list we've already seen from NXT and Bitshares and other projects.  Will illegal gambling and illegal crowdfunding apps produce mass adoption?  Probably not as they're reinventing the wheel when there's sites like GoFundMe and online gambling everywhere.   The rest of this list is vaporware or abandoned projects.

I saw him post he was 80% done creating a new coin.  Hopefully it will not be IPO'd to 11 people.

Noted...

Ripple Releases Interledger to Connect Banks and Blockchains

Ripple Labs shortened its name to Ripple this week, a move which according to company officials, signals its products are now "out of the lab" and ready for use.

Long one of the more well-funded startups in industry, Ripple was arguably the first to focus on use cases for distributed ledgers, introducing an alternative ledger that deviated from bitcoin's method for consensus and featured its own unique digital currency, XRP, as early as 2012.

Since then, Ripple has increasingly put forth in its public messaging that it is seeking to realize an "Internet of Value", a term that denotes a time when money could move as quickly as information does today. As a building block for this future, Ripple has introduced the Interledger protocol (ILP), which intends to act as an arbiter for all types of ledgers, both those that are distributed and traditional centralized alternatives.

Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas explained that ILP itself is not a ledger, as it does not seek consensus toward any state. Rather it provides a top-layer cryptographic escrow system that allows funds to move between ledgers with the help of intermediaries it calls "connectors".
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Further, ILP has no native token, so individual ledgers operating its protocol will still hold balances in their native units of account. Thomas contends such interoperability solves the issue of one specific payment network – be it Ripple or Visa – needing to reach global ubiquitousness.