Nxt will be launched soon. With its decentralized exchange it allows to create gateways like Ripple.
So there's Nxt, MasterCoin, BitShares (or is it ProtoShares?), eMunie, Open Transactions, all of which are supposedly going to be launched/released soon (any others?). It is very easy to market vaporware - just claim that your product has feature X, and it does. Since its just vaporware it can have all the best features before it even exists. Ripple, on the other hand, actually exists and already has one major gateway (kraken next in line) and two chinese gateways (with rising CNY capitalization btw, up from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY on Nov 12th to 787k CNY today). The competition hasn't even left the starting line. Nxt does exist. I mean exist as an actual product that people can use. That's more like a concept mock-up. Colored Coins did that two years ago. Where is colored coins now? Well, the original client developer, Stefan Thomas, moved on to become Ripple CTO. |
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Nxt will be launched soon. With its decentralized exchange it allows to create gateways like Ripple.
So there's Nxt, MasterCoin, BitShares (or is it ProtoShares?), eMunie, Open Transactions, all of which are supposedly going to be launched/released soon (any others?). It is very easy to market vaporware - just claim that your product has feature X, and it does. Since its just vaporware it can have all the best features before it even exists. Ripple, on the other hand, actually exists and already has one major gateway (kraken next in line) and two chinese gateways (with rising CNY capitalization btw, up from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY on Nov 12th to 787k CNY today). The competition hasn't even left the starting line. |
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Because when an exchange becomes a ripple gateway, you can withdraw fiat IOUs and trade them for another exchange's fiat IOUs. Which you can then redeem (deposit) at the other exchange. Presto, fiat moved without a bank transfer.
You're going to find that GoxUSD IOUs are worth less than StampUSD IOUs, which won't solve the problem then. GoxUSD might be worth less, but we would find it to be a lot closer to face-value than the current discount rate (there would be much more arbitrage of goxUSD if it could be withdrawn to ripple). Also, by enabling the trading of fiat IOUs with face-value, the market could directly discount the fiat IOUs (by the spread in bitstampUSD->XRP->mtgoxUSD). Then BTC prices should be more-or-less the same, which would be much better than a massive spread priced into BTC at every separate exchange. |
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bitcoinBull, XRP have all the same properties as BTC (no counterparty risk, limited in amount, pseudonymous). If we are going to use Ripple, why not switch to XRP entirely? Don't forget that Bitcoins within the Ripple system are merely IOUs issued by exchanges, only XRP can be held without counterparty risk, so they are inherently inferior.
I don't understand that.
Because, with BTC there's no uncertainty in the distribution scheme. By comparison, the XRP distribution scheme is highly fickle: depends on Ripple Labs market operations (which may turn out to be poorly managed), Ripple Labs private keys could be compromised (would be a fiasco much worse than the 2011 mtgox hack), the giveaways could be poorly managed and plagued by fraud, etc. I don't see any threat of the market switching over entirely (especially not if the exchange of BTC is the primary use of ripple gateways). |
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After all, arbitrage between exchanges seems to be slow and not very effective in the past.
Yes, that's because most exchanges are still relying 100% on bank transfers for moving fiat. The spreads will come down as more exchanges become ripple gateways (bitstamp was the first, kraken is next in line). And that solves the problem of bank transfers, how? Because when an exchange becomes a ripple gateway, you can withdraw fiat IOUs and trade them for another exchange's fiat IOUs. Which you can then redeem (deposit) at the other exchange. Presto, fiat moved without a bank transfer. |
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After all, arbitrage between exchanges seems to be slow and not very effective in the past.
Yes, that's because most exchanges are still relying 100% on bank transfers for moving fiat. The spreads will come down as more exchanges become ripple gateways (bitstamp was the first, kraken is next in line). |
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If you are lacking utility bills in your name/address, a simple landlord contract (search for a template) with your name/address on it should work.
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Typical Pump & Dump.
Don't worry if you are long term investor. We are still heading beyond $1000 this or next month.
The typical pump & dump is a penny stock which is spammed (the pump) and then sold (the dump), never to recover. That's more like some of the alt-chains and *coins going around, with premature promotion and shameless overhyping. The correction in bitcoin price is simple profit-taking. More extreme corrections are called crashes, followed by a bounce (if the trend stays intact), or a dead cat bounce (if the bounce fails to make a new high). |
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If you like gold, then hold gold. I like bitcoin because it is NOT gold. This quote from Peter Thiel (founder of paypal) is insightful: "It is worth thinking about money as the bubble that never ends. There is this sort of potential that bitcoin could become this new phenomenon,"
And even with that, I'm not still not 100% convinced that the bubble couldn't burst at some point (even gold and the USD fluctuate). I've panic sold before and I'll panic sell again. Economic bubbles are just inherent to human society, going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Might as well work on a solution to stopping war and all political conflict. You'd have a better chance solving a scientific problem, like curing cancer.
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I agree, bitcoin "will not replace the dollar" and it also won't wash your dishes. But its best damn offshore online speculative investment the internet has ever seen. |
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After seeing so many people disagree, I just wanted to say I agree with the OP. Those who were here in 2011 saw a quick bust of a bubble. That is not the time-scale it usually happens on, and it already dealt quite some damage. A long bust of a speculative mania can be quite destructive.
But if it is about ideology, there's not much reason to be distressed by this. Bitcoin is just a tool, replaceable and one of many potential solutions. If it really is superior, it will survive anyway. If not, chances are it wasn't fit for the job in the first place. Time will tell, but one way or another, it is just one of many battles against insane financial policy. And Bitcoin alone can't win that war anyway.
Also, sane policies would render Bitcoin entirely redundant. Value can be stored in gold and cheaply transferred via banking -- at a better computational order than Bitcoin offers. If the efficient combination of the two classic methods weren't suppressed, Bitcoin could hardly compete.
So don't fret; let's enjoy the show and be curious how it turns out in the end.
Ya'll better listen to this man. Vandroiy is a legend, he won a 5,000 BTC bet that pirate would go bust. FYI. ...but this ridiculous price bubble will destroy Bitcoin and probably all other cryptocurrencies when it pops. For 99.99% of the Bitcoin community this is irrelevant as you are involved purely to profit, you have no ideological interest in the underlying concept, but for those who are genuinely interested in alternative currency models it's a pending disaster.
Wait, so your argument is only relevent to 0.001% of the bitcoin community, and yet its also a pending disaster? There's a contradiction in your logic.. You presume that the true "underlying concept" is a "genuine alternative currency model". I deduce that bitcoin's killer app is as a speculative investment vehicle (offshore tax-free) for gambling on price fluctuations. If Bitcoin is to be a real currency its relative value to that which it seeks to supplant is irrelevant. The way for its value to grow is by providing value by becoming a ubiquitous medium of exchange. Indeed, that was the plan initially, then somewhere along the way that idea was ditched and the speculators moved in.
There was never a coherent plan initially. Gavin was the main guy promoting bitcoin as a payments currency and solution for merchants, pooh-poohing "buy low sell high". But the market has clearly chosen bitcoin based on a quite different value proposition. Good post, I pretty much agree. |
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Yes, but these are growing pains. Right now you are correct, bitcoin does appear to be more of an investment tool than currency but that will change.
I disagree. Its been a speculation/investment tool from day 1 and I don't expect it will ever change. People thought it had reached stability at $5, haha. Now its over $500 and just as volatile. Even the gold market is volatile. Bitcoin will never be stable. Volatility is your friend, embrace it. |
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Not currency, but valuable commodity. Given the fact it is P2P, bitcoin cannot be banned, seized or whatever  I agree. Since day 1 (about $0.85 in my case), I've saw far greater potential was as a speculative asset / offshore value-storage account, than as a grandma's e-currency for online payments. Gavin was one of the people always pushing to sign up merchants to use as a "currency" (he signed up his neighbors to sell alpaca socks), instead of a game about "buying low and selling high". But clearly, such efforts are futile. |
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Not familiar with it, unfortunately. Could you provide a link? (I'm always about learning new things ) . Click "wallet" in the top right to create a wallet. Since bitstamp is the biggest ripple gateway, its the best way to get money into XRP right now. Without a bitstamp account, i think the best alternatives are dividendrippler.com and ripplewise.com. The best XRP chart is http://xrp.webr3.org/usd-xrp. It shows the bitstamp USD order book (lower price is better, because XRP is the quote currency so price is read as "103 XRP to the dollar"). |
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I suspect that the scrypt based altcoins, particularly litecoin (even though I'm amused by and like some of the others) will do the job it's creators envisioned. Act as silver to BTC's gold. With perhaps another acting as copper.
Right, but silver is just a more volatile PM, price is still highly correlated. So its not a good alternative/hedge. If there's going to be an alternative crypto-currency with a price less correlated (or inversely correlated) to BTC, I'm betting that its XRP (as the dollar to the gold). For one, its the most different (not just an alt-chain). For two, its the only existing alternative to bank transfers for withdrawing fiat or moving fiat between exchanges. This time around, when other exchanges have their share of the same problems/delays processing fiat withdrawals that mtgox had, i expect ripple/XRP to very well positioned. Both in terms of utility/adoption, and price gains. But its just a bet, and I could be wrong. |
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Spare us the earnest explanations, Ripple is just a way of recording all your financial transactions as obligations and swapping them with other Ripple users. It enables you to do nothing that wasn't already possible using cryptocurrency, exchanges and the fiat system. In fact, you can do less with it, as it seeks to act as a go between for these systems, but there are no well known fiat institutions or exchanges that work with Ripple. And even if there were, you have to use the real systems it is piggybacking anyway, otherwise the obligations you've created can't be fulfilled.
Complete waste of time.
One cool aspect is that you can see the total bitstamp funds held on ripple (current bitstamp gateway cap is $357k USD and 2,703 BTC). Before ripple, the only other way you could estimate the total USD or BTC funds on an exchange was by adding up the total bids and asks visible on the order book. When an exchange becomes a ripple gateway, it gets more transparent. Its pretty neat being able to watch the total fiat funds moving in and out through ripple (kind of like the early excitement i had watching btc transactions move around on the blockchain at bitcoinmonitor.com). Its as if you worked at the bank and had access to bitstamp bank account records (just a partial view though - only the fund movement through ripple). IMO the gateway cap is also a very useful indicator for speculating, both on BTC price but even moreso on XRP price. e.g. if bitstamp.USD is being redeemed and deposited back to bitstamp, then somebody is probably planning to buy BTC (and vise-versa XRP). |
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Someone asked is 100 billion final cap. Yes, you could read it on this article too: As with bitcoin, a finite number of ripple will be created — 100 billion. How is that enforced? By (open-source) code, which cryptographically verifies changes to the ledger (like bitcoin does for changes to the blockchain). The ledger started at 100B, decreasing from there. ripplebot on ledger #3297478. Total: 99,999,998,515.225847/XRP
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XRP is 100% "pre-mined" and controlled by a couple of big businesses, so, anyone who invest there - are just participating in another yet Ponzi scheme.
Well it obviously makes little sense to compare XRP to a mineable alt-coin. It is more comparable to shares in a company stock. AAPL, EBAY (paypal), TWTR, etc. IMO it is actually less ponzi-like than traditional company shares with IPO price-rigging, dilution, fraudulent accounting, and so on. And it is a lot less ponzi-like than some of the alt-coins which are raising funds on little more than overhyped proposals and lists of desired features - in one word: vaporware. While Ripple actually exists, has gateways, growing liquidity, and is already useful. Hooray, let's replace the debt backed monetary system with.... an obligation backed monetary system! Wait.... that's suspiciously similar to debt based....
When you deposit funds to a bitcoin exchange, be it USD or BTC, the exchange is "obligated" to give it back when you want to withdraw (redeem). Its the exact same situation with ripple gateways (which is why some bitcoin exchanges are also already ripple gateways). Except on ripple you can trade and transfer deposits of any currency: USD, EUR, BTC, LTC... I love cold hard coin as much as anyone. But sometimes one wants to move USD around to different exchanges (e.g. to arbitrage price differences), and that's what Ripple does. |
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There's no way the Chinese will be interested in Ripple over Bitcoin - if they truly are interested in moving away from USD, then they would be more likely to get behind Bitcoin than an american company's version.
Actually the CNY gateway cap has jumped over the past month (from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY currently, mostly at rippleCN), and I'm seeing a lot more CNY trades, so volume has increased too. Still a lot less than BTCChina, obviously, but it is spilling over. Stefan Thomas (ripple CTO) gave the keynote speech about Ripple at SDCC (software developer china conference) in Beijing a few months ago, microsoft VPs were among the other speakers. Ripple has no elevator pitch. The system is way too complicated. I also don't like it being a debt based system. Isn't it the debt based monetary system that created all this trouble in the first place?
Ripple's "killer app" right now is moving fiat between bitcoin exchanges. Ripple is an alternative to bank transfers, because you can hold gateway funds in any currency and transfer them (not just BTC), much quicker and easier than a wire transfer. Don't be surprised when more bitcoin exchanges become ripple gateways, bitstamp is just the first. Its also misunderstood as debt based. Mostly because the "ripple classic" (which existed years before bitcoin) design was around community-based chains of credit (LETS local exchange trading system). Jed McCaleb & co-founders bought the ripple.com domain name from Ryan Fuggers. But they are building a much simpler network, where the trust lines are extended to gateways (the bitcoin exchanges) rather than community-lenders, and funds are backed by deposits (not debt/credit). But yea it is easy to confuse, especially for people who had first heard of ripple-classic (classic.ripplepay.com). |
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My withdrawal was finally processed (I had filed a ticket also), with a totally different transaction.
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