Could you explain why you've chosen to publish keys rather than using Mike Hearn's algorithm? I have to admit I find the writeup on the Bitcoin wiki confusing, but maybe you could shed some light on it.

One advantage your approach appears to have is that you are not signing a transaction, in fact you need not even know what transaction it might unlock if it used P2SH or hasn't been published. This could limit temptations or threats you might be exposed to, including legal liability.

A potential complication is that people could send money to the published public keys. What would you do with such funds?

Great stuff! I wonder if you guys could use a blockchain-based trusted timestamping service like virtual-notary.org, proofofexistence.com etc to keep a record of events that you've registered, together with the public keys for the two possible outcomes. Once you've published the correct private key for an event, you could have that fact notarised too. In this way you could build up a reliability record that people can check.

There's a script somewhere in the tree that generates this list. I think it's the same list as that used by the DNS nodes, only hardcoded into the source while the list maintained by the DNS nodes is dynamic. I'd have to check, but I believe the hardcoded list is tried before using the DNS nodes, to avoid overloading them.

Check out the link I posted above, it gives an overview of prices in various currencies, including "cross rates". There are real differences:

https://bitcoinaverage.com/#USD

I'd add a screenshot, but I can't find a button for attachments.

Have a look at the newly updated coinaverage.com which now supports many more currencies as well as cross rates.

Does the Kraken public API support CORS?

It's not theft if the law says you can do it!  Defendants do get compensation of course, if they are acquitted.

They had said as much earlier. Then again, I was amazed to learn that in my own country, the Netherlands, the government does regularly sell seized goods before the legal process has completed. If the defendants are acquitted, they get back the amount the government got when it sold their possessions. The government tends to do that for bulky goods, good with highly variable prices, or if the costs of safe storage make it worthwhile to sell. In the case I enquired about it was a bunch of BTC seized from FBTC Exchange, which they sold because it was so volatile. I called the public prosecutor's office, and they explained the policy to me.

Yeah, somehow euro prices are higher than dollar prices, which is absurd.

They told me they're working on it.

That's the idea, but there would be other fees, because gateways can charge fees for letting IOUs change hands. Competition would be needed to ensure reasonable prices.

I'm talking with my neighbour, who is a Turkish entrepreneur, about setting up something like that. Since bank accounts are free for private citizens in the Netherlands everybody has one, so that's not the problem.


Opening a small shop to handle cash transactions wouldn't be a problem. The shop could then deal with the gateway, or maybe directly buy BTC.


Withdrawing from a gateway to the Turkish banking system is possible, but then you still incur wire transfer fees. That's not prohibitive for large amounts, but then you lose the advantage of using a crypto intermediary.


In the long term the most convenient thing would be to issue EUR IOUs and TRY IOUs (or to use those issued by some reputable third party) and to use the distributed exchange that's built into Ripple, but that will take a lot of work to deal with compliance.

The two main use cases I see at the moment are remittances and buying / selling Bitcoin. A Turkish migrant in the Netherlands who wants to wire 100 euros home is faced with a minimum fee of 15 euros. By contrast, sending 10,000 euros costs 20 euros, but few people send such large amounts.

If this takes off, I expect economies of scale and competition to drive down prices considerably.

For me the killer use case was and is as a distributed exchange for buying / selling Bitcoin. I learned about it just after I had learned of Bitcoin, some time in April I think. It may have been in this article: Ripple, a Peer-to-Peer Financing Network, Could Make Bitcoin Great (Or Destroy It)

Another very promising one is remittance payments by migrant workers.

Anyone who can understand Bitcoin and doesn't understand Ripple isn't really trying. Could be lack of interest, lack of time, could be denial or massive cognitive dissonance, could be dishonesty.

And that's a feature, not a bug.


Of course they are, that's the function of gateways, to issue and redeem IOUs that can be traded between any pair of individuals who trust the same gateway. This is very similar to what banks and payment processors do. You deposit cash with them and are then able transfer money between accounts without having to withdraw immediately.


Don't criticise something you clearly don't understand.

You need ~31 XRP to get started, 20 to activate your account, 10 for one offer in the order book, and 1 for transaction costs. The first two are minimum reserves, that is, the functionality won't work if you have less than that amount in your account, but they are not deducted. You get your 10 XRP back as soon as the offer is accepted or canceled. The 1 XRP for transaction costs will last you a long time because transaction fees are tiny.

If you want to get your hands on some XRP, you can buy them on an exchange, buy them from someone informally or earn them by donating CPU cycles to things like cancer research at computingforgood.org.

That's not a use case Ripple is intended to facilitate. You can of course choose to make direct XRP payments, just as with any other cryptocurrency.


The fee for the netted payments to be exact. Fees at gateways are on the order of 1%, not the 15% fee Western Union charges.


Remittances and buying selling cryptocurrencies against fiat currencies are the killer applications right now.

You can still use Ripple if Bitstamp is temporarily down. There might be a future for gateways that focus exclusively on issuing and redeeming IOUs, without offering a proprietary trading engine.

Could be a good feature request. Being able to set the "require authorisation" bit from the standard client would be nice too, so you can't accidentally end up facilitating payments for and owing money to Jack the Ripper.