Enjoy!  I think that's enough to activate an account.

First of all, you have no grounds to call me a liar.  Let's get that clear right away.  We can disagree about OpenCoin's intent, and we can argue back and forth on #1 (is 'unreleased open source' 'open source' enough?), but even given those caveats Ripple is definitely decentralized, and you're confused if you think otherwise.


This only works if the network accepts it...which if the regulators are threatening to guantanamo the contingency plans go into effect, and the network starts to bloom without the extra XRP.  Also WHO CARES if XRP are inflated into oblivion?  XRP are practically worthless anti-spam tokens.  Let's hope they DO inflate XRP by an extra few orders of magnitude before they go public, to make absolutely sure that they are cheap enough to be easy to obtain.  I do not think this is in the cards, though I think that lowering the reserve requirement also works to the same end in practice, I do not think that it matters at all how many XRP there are just what the reserve requirements are.

As mentioned in the other thread - OpenCoin has a contingency plan in effect saying that if they do get shut down by regulators, the source (which is open source, just not released) will be released, and plans for the network to continue will be executed.  Regulators will not kill Ripple, though apathy and other things might.

Do you ever conduct trade with anyone?  Ever buy anything?  Do you work for a living?

Ripple will be completely decentralized.  It is not designed to be a 'single entity', and though there will be nodes that will be regulated -- there will be those which will not.  The final project is however not yet complete, though they must be getting close by now.


The 'something' you are missing is Gateways, which obviate the reason for these difficulties.   Obviously, it's better if you have the network of friends and trusted contacts, however.

Gateways are only necessary because Ripple is going to have to coexist with fiat currencies for a long time.  It's a hard sell to suggest that we can just up and do away with fiat currency entirely before too long -- in the meanwhile, the more of your value you can get out of the Gateways and into helping people, the better.

From the Ripple.com wiki:

Who will run validating nodes?

ie enough people that this, while in theory is a valid concern, isn't going to be much of a serious one.


There's always going to be a way to satisfy some(at the cost of others) in distribution of wealth - this wealth distribution problem is not unique to ripple, and not even really unique to currency.  However you're correct in that if it's not distributed in a way that satisfies enough people Ripple will not succeed.  It does not have to satisfy all participants, however -- just enough of them.  Network effects and other factors will take care of the rest.


As far as the interface is concerned, that will be improved as more businesses get involved, and the server is released.  As far as Ripple itself...well maybe.  But then again, the internet and email is pretty complicated, but people figured those out.


This sounds like semantics.

Can do -- rM1oqKtfh1zgjdAgbFmaRm3btfGBX25xVo if you can make a 10M$ payment to that that would be fantastic.  Send me a message if you would like to actually do this, I'll talk to some people we'll see what we can do[but like I said -- convenience is the key -- it probably isn't useful to have to have a bottleneck of what I can smuggle to your location but, you know for that kind of coin I could probably get a heliocopter involved/etc].

He is signing up newbies to Ripple with the false expectation that they will get 1BTC from him when in fact he purposefully leads them into signing him up with a 100BTC trust limit to himself.  I personally do not think this is worthy of a 'scammer' tag but others have certainly suggested that this straddles the line on the wrong side.

This is a problem that will be a lot more tractable when we have the 100s of trillion of dollars that central banking bleeds out of our lives, on a global level, even if OpenCoin takes a chunk of it.  This abuse is real and we should not discount it.  I believe Ripple will allow us to see the causes and effects of this abuse more clearly.

They aren't mutually exclusive, and it's not a stupid idea.  Ripple has supported Bitcoin since practically day #1, way back in 2009-10 -- it does so because Bitcoin and Ripple are both on the bleeding edge together, and as complementary systems their users share very much the same interests.

Like everything else decentralized, you only need one person to 'interface' with existing banking, somewhere on the network.  Everything else is convenience.

And by the way, if any of you need to interact with the legacy banking system, hit me up a message and we'll try to work something out if you've got credit to me.

We are not overplaying it because *that is the whole point of Ripple*.  The amount of trust between people dwarfs and will continue to dwarf by orders of magnitude any trust to gateways -- though it remains to be seen how much of that trust will actually make its way onto the ledger.  I think I have ~200$ in gateways, and about ~16,000$ in people.  That's about a 80:1 ratio and I would expect others to have similar ratios, once they get that this is a possible and useful thing.

This is outside of the scope of Ripple as Ripple itself but it is perfectly reasonable, when offering credit to someone, to demand something in return for it, like collateral or signing a document or something.


I won't even justify this with an answer unless you clarify that you care about other people as human beings, and their interests and rights and human dignity.


The difference between Prosper and Ripple is that Prosper is about profit.  It isn't about getting to learn about how people around you use their money, and helping them, as a group, use it more effectively.  Transparency is good, and it should be something that comes along with any credit, really, as much as possible.


But the thing is -- all you need is the trust between individuals.  In practice, that is all all of our societies run on, as is, really.  Trust aggregates and scales in practice.

With Ripple you control how *valuable* your money of choice is, with obvious limits (you're not going to pull the value of BTC itself up very far, but you will determine to a great extent how much BTC you have to spend)


A gateway is "central" in that it interfaces with other currency systems, in ways that normal individuals aren't going to care to.  Without other systems to interact with, gateways would be unnecessary.


The catch being that your "printed" debt will only be taken seriously insofar as you are trustworthy.  The free lunch isn't in the printing of the money, trust me.


...by someone who has no way of paying that.   ie practically nobody people in the ripple network are not affected by that credit link at all.   All this link is is an expression of utter trust between two nodes -- it is as if the CPU in a single machine is trusting the RAM in that same single machine.  If either malfunctions, the other is probably not usable -- this level of practically infinite trust is useful to represent in some situations.  All it means is that if you trust either, you're effectively trusting both.


It's worth remding readers here that XRP is not Ripple, it is a special purpose currency used for spam prevention.  If the half they keep becomes valuable, it will be because of the half they do not keep -- and if *that* becomes valuable, it will be because it is serving a use and adding value to the network.   They will only prosper to the extent that they are increasing the utility of their userbase.  Let the market sort this out.


It is not *finished* yet.  there is a difference between proprietary and unreleased software.  It is true they can still change the rules -- they can wipe the slate clean (this is called a 'jubilee') -- which is why you shouldn't use a beta system for anything of serious value.  You should, instead use villages.cc if you need Ripple to do something in a more verifiable way.


Ripple alone could replace central banks.  It builds on top of them only to the extent that it builds on top of *all* trust.


Big words for someone who's got his own marketing campaign going on to discredit Ripple.


And yet, in the long run we're dead.  What we need is a system that works now, that uses trust that we have now, built on top of human relationships and human computer relationships we have now.  It's true that not all people are equally trustable, and that if you're putting 1BTC through Ripple there needs to be a credit path between you and whatever it is you're trying to send to.  This is by design.  If you are not trustworthy, you will find it difficult to spend any significant amount through the network.  You'll have to default back to Bitcoin and other systems, if so.  However there are more transactions that are possible, more and better opportunities for trade -- and we are making them happen.

...pretty sure OpenCoin does not control bitstamp. 

You may want to read https://ripple.com/wiki/Reserves

tl; dr you need a minimum amount of XRP to
* Start an account
* Create a connection to someone else
* Send a payment through the network.

Try villages.cc instead if you're having trouble with Ripple.com

Which is why you should only loan what you are willing to lose.  The system will work with that.


Depends if you make them so.  That is up to the people making the connection.  Some people will only offer credit if the conditions for the offer are legally binding.  Others, will trust unscrupulous people with 100BTC for no reason at all.  And lots will happen in between.


What is a FICO score?  It is an abstraction of whether or not a person is expected to pay their debt.   Ripple is an competitor system to FICO and it is reasonable to pay no attention to FICO but keep your Ripple connections in good standing, because quite frankly, FICO is an inhumane institution that does not have the interest of the people it manages at heart.

In the future if these institutions are useful, they will be implemented in a decentralized way.  But for the moment I wouldn't be worried about it, unless you're thinking of putting serious amounts of value into the Ripple network instead of just being a user.  In which case, you should probably be using Villages.cc, not OpenCoin's implementation(as it's not done yet and they could still yet have a jubilee before it's released).

Ripple forces you to do nothing.  Ripple allows you to take debt, if it makes sense for you to do so.  It also offers you the option of creating debt for others to take.  It as a system acknowledges that money is debt, regardless of whether the underlying asset is or not (such as bitcoin).  No one is forced to do anything with ripple, except that when you have created debt, your debt automatically is treated as something the system can work with and allocate in an efficient way, depending on the needs of the network.

When there are tens of thousands of Ripple exchanges, it will be very impractical to police any substantial portion of them.