Weil besonders Amazongutscheine meist mit Paysafecards und ähnlichem bezahlt wurden. Da es dort kaum Möglichkeiten gibt, diese wieder in "Geld" (bar oder auch nur auf's Konto) zu tauschen ist es oftmals für Betroffene günstiger, 10% billigere Gutscheine anzubieten als woanders 15-20% draufzuzahlen.

Außerdem sind z.B. 100€ von Amazon ja auch weniger nützlich als 100€ auf der Bank oder 100€ in meiner Brieftasche, da ich damit NUR auf Amazon einkaufen darf und mir Amazon die 100€ auch nicht wieder geben wird.

Drittens gibt es immer wieder mal Probleme auch bei Gutscheincodes mit Chargebacks - also Geldrückforderungen. 1000€ Gutscheine kaufen, mit Paypal zahlen, Gutscheine erhalten, Zahlung stornieren, Gutscheine inzwischen verkaufen... Paypal holt sich das Geld von Amazon, Amazon erklärt die Gutscheine für nichtig und der unwissende Käufer hat Pech gehabt. Auch dieses Risiko wird damit in den Preis miteinbezogen.

Zu guter LEtzt gibt es teils immer mal Angebote, wo man auch Gutscheine günstiger als den Nominalwert kaufen kann. Auch hier wollenKäufer meist am Gewinn beteiligt werden.

How?

This is only useful to rank/score peers, the data generated is quite random... you might be able (by bruteforcing it) to generate some meaningful data from time to time (then this would be kind of a compression mechanism) but the content of the data definitely is NOT the focus here, rather the guaranteed waste of ressources, thus being "invested" into the relationship with you. This could help with bootstrapping issues, as a completely new peer has no data to offer and will have to leech initially. With Proof of Storage as described here, he can make sure that he will stay connected longer, as it otherwise would be quite a waste of ressources for him to leech + leave.

Doing a hash tree over a file would then mean that the construction of my tree needs to be randomized too, otherwise the counterparty would compute the same tree and throw away the file. I thought that you want a mechanism to make sure that a random client actually DOES have the full block chain stored... This proposal is something different and more along the lines of the NashX proposal, where both parties show something of high value before proceeding further. Before it was ressources like data on one end, nothing for a new peer on the other end. Now you can at least "invest" ressource exhaustion with this approch on the other end of the deal which shows that you are committed to this relationship.

I'm not too sure if that can beat Tit-for-Tat though, as after some time you probably want to transfer from Proof of Storage (exhaustion) to something like seed ratios or similar.

Also I'm not too sure that you can infer from the willingness to waste ressources the willingness to play fair.
Imagine this scheme in BitTorrent: Seeds accept new leechers only if they either have at least 10% of a file available or agree to waste 1 GB (random numbers). Now I as a new node can connect to a handful of seeds and load my first 10%. This does not mean that I'm willing at all to contribute anything back to the swarm in sense of upload. With tit-for-tat I'd get the whole file eventually even without uploading anything but I'll be severely choked by any peer out there quite fast. With ressource exhaustion, I just need to lie that I am a new fresh node and will get anything. My cost is the disk space + energy used for the calculations, BUT there is no gain on the seeder's end and also not for the network! The only way to detract me from doing these things would be to make it more expensive to run this attack than to participate. Given current electricity prices and HDD prices, there will be a lot of controversy about the "correct" size + computational requirements (you could build a tree where you have a much more "difficult" hash).

Likely not, as you are probably more interested in having counterparties that also share files with you than ones that provably waste hard drive space.

I initially thought "Proof of Storage" would mean that A has a large file that B previously had, then A periodically prooves to B that she still has the full file available.

The current idea is rather along the lines of "Proof of wasted HDD-space" (until CPUs catch up and it becomes faster to just generate the tables on the fly then to look them up from disk) and is intended to be used for deciding which connections to drop based on how "invested" other nodes are in you. This liely needs to be a longer time relationship than the usual file sharing time frame to pay off.

For me Autolend leaves a balance of up to 0.10 units out of orders. Not much in USD but more than 10 times (currently 16 times) as much in BTC...

Ripple is not so good to settle 1 on 1 trades... You can do that elsewhere too. Ripple is a decentralized exchange, so you would create an offer and hope that it gets taken or take an offer that someone else published.

Ripple can trade any of these coins, but it needs someone to actually issue and redeem them (or enable deposits and withdrawals to the ripple market in other words).

I think in the proposal for DIANNA this mining approach was used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Francis

You should look at the gateway related pages/sites in the official wiki as a starter.

It can be done manually of course, otherwise you'd need to use the API that rippled exposes. The official client also does nothing more than to ask for publicly known data over a websocket connection and send locally signed transactions back, if necessary. A gateway would act similarly.

Transaction blinding is done in the current github giveaway, you can check the source code in Javascript from their page.

Not that I know of, though it should be possible to act as a gateway for them - then markets can form.

For the record, my ticket about a Ripple deposit is still open after 5 months(!).

The transaction can be queried from the public servers easily, though not from weexchange's rippled apparently (I wonder if they ever upgraded?). This means they claim they don't know about my deposit and won't credit it. Probably someone might need to invest an afternoon and look through the incoming transactions and check if they have been credited in the system of weexchange. It seems since 5 months they didn't have the time do do so neither on their own nor when someone writes them a ticket about it.

Good luck in getting any money from them!

Just like in any ledger system - issue the balances from somewhere and transfer them to the respective accounts. In excel you just enter a number, in Ripple you do a bit more, but the end result is nearly the same.

The main difference is that Ripple will allow you to trade the balances, Excel will require manual intervention. This can be good or bad, depending on what you wnat to accomplish.

He deletes posts like the one above complaining about high prices, this is a self moderated topic after all.

It is the choice of any customer to use the prices of the OP or do their own research, the premium you pay is probably for the convenience you get?

It might be useful to write a guide on how to use Ripple to trade BTC, it is a distributed exchange system after all.

Well, XRP usually went down when BTC went up against the Dollar.

With so much mistrust against USD (2 days to go until bankruptcy of the issuer?) of course BTC are trending up heavily. This creates a downward pressure on XRP, which are very easily exchangeable for BTC after all (which is kinda their purpose).

There is no need to hold any significant amounts of XRP unless you want to start/build a service or want to speculate on them (which I really wouldn't recommend at all, considering ~96% of them are not even in circulation!).

Ripple is not XRP and if you are invested in XRP, you would better stop posting on forums and start building services just like if you are invested in BTC you should better increase adoption than building bubble after bubble.

Ripple would be a marketplace, allowing your users to trade whatever they trade directly on the system and settle the trade (in person for example) afterwards. If you only have a handful of assets you are trading, this might be nice to have, if it is something like a big store with hundreds/thousands of articles, I doubt that this is something your users will like.

With any system sometimes someone has to enter information - either your treasurer or your users themselves. In the first case ledger-cli or google docs (if you want it visible online) or some other online accounting tool might be a good choice, in the latter case you need some overview + education for your users.

Ripple can be very simple or very complex, depending on how many of its features you use. You probably know your user base better than me - if it is people trading Bitcoins and a couple of other fungible assets with each other, then Ripple might be great. If it is housewives trading hand-knitted pullovers you might have a problem, as you would need to represent each pullover uniquely in the system.

Since you already have a spreadsheet (I hope with backups!), I'd go for Google docs personally, unless I get more concrete info about this trading community. Atm. people anyways have to trust your treasurer (who hopefully gets audited every once in a while) and they seem to be comfortable with that, if you have hundreds of members. With that many people, also dedicated accounting software might be useful and I hope your treasurer knows how to do proper bookkeeping.

Well, copyright laws for example deal with the idea that there is wealth in something immaterial that needs to be saved + preserved and can be inherited.

If you want a time frame after which it would be OK to either redistribute or invalidate coins, I'd recommend looking at the time frames a book is still protected under copyright, even if the author used a pseudonym or is otherwise unknown. This is not in the range of months or years, rather in decades!

Something like reclaiming coins after 100 years (or 25 block reward changes...) after their last move might be an option - you would not live to see it in action though. Anything below that is VERY short sighted and again there are alternative coins out there that do this and that you can use right now instead of Bitcoin.

I guess the question is what comes after LTC and NMC at Gox...

Well, in any case you need to have initial transfers, be it in Bitcoin, Ripple, ledger-cli or an Excel spreadsheet.

The question is, should it be an accounting tool (menaning there are trades happening and after some time you collet the trades and enter them in the system) or should it support trading as well (so you don't have to run after people and ask for their trades, they can trade without you knowing)? In the first case, ledger-cli (or something like GNUcash) might be the easiest solution, in the latter case I'd recommend going for a Ripple community implementation. How many people are we talking about? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?

I do...

My reasoning: They are looking for money and partners - they won't find them in Bitcoinland easily any more (see coinbase), so they need to support other (established: SLL, new: XRP) markets with strong partner support.

So if I use this on my desktop system, your service then gets not one but 2(!) IPs from me (mobile phone + desktop) that it can correlate + 2 browsers to fingerprint...

Why not just use Google's 2FA scheme salted with a user name (since it only maps to 6 digit numbers to make manual input possible)?

Because for example Satoshi holds more than ~10% of all Bitcoins. Or he has lost the keys already.

This is a large uncertainty factor, but on the other hand I think it would be far worse if someone could loose coins just because they did not read forums or log into the main client for a few years. There are coins out there that work just like Bitcoin with this "feature" added - if you think it is vital, please use these other currencies instead, they will over time overtake Bitcoin because they are superior because of that.