16292 funded accounts as of now, see https://ripplecharts.com/

Mine them, sell something you have or are able to do for BTC or buy them on an exchange.

You prostituted yourself by adopting TradeFortress' signature already, maybe you can find something else too?

So in reality you are selling a pre-order and you have 0 Avalon hardware in hands at the moment, right?

I'm not aware of any kind of transaction in Ripple (probably JoelKatz can shed more light on this) that would even allow issuing more XRP out of the blue.
Anyways, we're quite a bit offtopic here, if you want to continue to argue that XRP are worthless (or worth less...), please open another thread for discussing this.

What I find interesting is that even though Opencoin just started their giveaway of 1000 XRP to their mailing list, the price compared to BTC actually rose, so more and more people are selling BTC for XRP, not the other way round! I would have suspected that lots of Bitcoiners/latecomers for the forum giveaway would just cash out their 1k XRP and be smug about the "free 10-15 Bitcents"...

Either they don't even want that free money (or it is "too much hassle"?) or TradeFortress and co should have better invested their ad money in a usable OpenTransaction client bounty.

A BTC is not a proof of work, you can obtain them without having done any mining.
Also they are fungible, meaning that you can spend a BTC that was created when difficulty was still 1 the same as a recent one with difficulty far OVER 9000.

As I already said: I don't believe Opencoin (with whom I'm not affiliated in any way) will issue any more XRP, you're free to suggest a formal bet (in BTC with escrow and whatnot) on that to me.

Your client most likely also doesn't trace back to the coinbase transaction (except if you are using colored coins).
Anyways, as I "don't answer your questions" let me have a last try:

I'm serious.

You cannot be sure, jsut as you cannot be sure that there will be 21 million Bitcoins ever. There is no inherent limit in the underlying mathematics, so any limit (100 billion XRP, 21 million BTC) is an arbitrary choice that is done by a community in the case of Bitcoin and a company in the case of XRP. In both cases it is against their expressed intent to issue more currency than initially planned. Both currencies are not backed by anything really but their utility as money and the trust of their respective community. Just as the Bitcoin community would probably react negatively or even hostile towards anyone changing the maximum amount of Bitcoins, a similar loss in trust would be the case with Opencoin + XRP inflation.

As I said, you cannot be sure with any cryptocurrency that rules won't change BUT it is in the best interest of the ones running that currency to make sure to deliver on their promises as they are mainly backed by trust and utility, not gold or a country.

Proof of Work is not magically limiting your Bitcoins to 21 millions, there are PoW coins out there with different/no limits and some with all/lots of coins mined in the genesis block.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "verifying", I assumed that you mean "check, if that transaction I received actually is valid, has been finalized in the global ledger and I can spend the money I received". My answer has been "it works just like BTC" which was not enough for you.

You verify the transactions in the blocks aka. ledger since genesis, just like in Bitcoin.
After your transaction is in there, you can spend the money with your private key. It does not matter when it has been created, just like in Bitcoin, as long as the transaction used to send it to you was valid, the XRP/BTC are valid too.

how can BTC have any value if it's possible for anyone to run their own Bitcoin network ie. the software is open source?

Terra = earth
Tera = SI prefix for trillion

XRP work just like BTC, you can trace them back to the genesis block. The block chain is called "Ledger" in Ripple, the client + API to access it is Open Source.

AFAIK you can not load money to this card, you can only spend from it. I don't know if PayPal accepts them for funding accounts, I would guess yes.

I have more than 1 Ripple account... I cannot open millions though, as there is a proof of ownership mechanism at works to be able to use an account (you need to have at least 50 XRP in an account afaik)

No, that there won't be >= 100 Billion XRP in total before they go OpenSource/distributed.

See "What about XRPs, how can I be sure opencoin doesn't start issuing them at will?" - I'd offer 1:1 betting, so there is a chance to win the same amount back if they really issue more XRP than they promised to!

If this can be achieved somehow, it would be great to have.

The big issue is indeed: How?

Some ideas from the top of my head:
Biometrics to provide a hash (e.g. finger print, retina scan)
3rd party trust/verification, like government IDs/certificates
DNA hash?!

All of the things I can come up with though are cheatable more or less easily or require a lot of trust.

Another approach would be crowdsourcing: To let someone open an account, require existing account holders to verify this person. Then only accept payments from verified persons or within a small degree of that.
Still if I just look at the amount of fake facebook profiles that people get friends with, I don't think that verification of existence should be down to a circle of friends...

Bitcoin solved this distribution problem with Proof of Work ("If you exist, you can run a program that grants you BTC out of nowhere"). Ripple circumvents it by using mostly IOUs (they require trust anyways) and used the central issuer approach for their actual currency XRP. there is also the possibility of mixing in Proof of Stake ("If you own some coins, you get more than somebody who has none so far"), I think PPC operates like this where you can mine coins if you have 0 so far, but also current coin owners get more coins automatically.

What about a client that works with Mike Hearn's rapidly adjusted micropayments?

This doesn't matter: If a piece of a bomb building instruction booklet is coming from your IP, you're the main suspect. The issue is that at some point the file will need to be decrypted and if you want to publish a file on the net, there is no way that you can control only people who are not working in law enforcement are allowed to download it...

Also please elaborate on how I can prove that I actually store + host 10 TB of data while having these 10 TB attached to a Raspberry Pi on a 56k modem.

You can only verify the past, in both Ripple and Bitcoin. In Bitcoin you can also run a node yourself that will enforce rules for the future for you - it is however not possible to say if the coins guarded by this client will even be accepted anywhere in the future, as there is potential for hard forks. Ripple intentionally did not let many people run nodes yet, to do more events that would be equivalent to a hard fork in Bitocoin while developing.

I don't want to go on speculating what happens if the 4 biggest pools decide to mine different coins instead of the current BTC, but I can assure you that they DO have a lot of decision power and other pools are just not even fit to handle the amount of miners.

The "it's not true" part is as true for XRP as for BTC - in both cases new rules COULD be entered in the system in theory. In practice it is as unlikely (actually even more unlikely, XRP have a higher market cap than BTC currently for example) as for BTC core rules to change to issue more XRP. If you wish to bet money (BTC) on that, I'm more than willing to participate. So far noone has yet offered any bet statement + bet amount that XRP will actually be issued before Ripple becomes Open Source.

Since difficulty can change during a day, which of the 2 difficulties (higher/lower) will be used for calculation or do you calculate the actual proper amount based on the time stamp of the block where difficulty changes?

Also I'm not too happy with the "buyback at 200 times current dividend" clause... Maybe change it to "the mining income of 200 days at 1 MH/s at the current difficulty". All you need to do otherwise is to pay a 1 Satoshi dividend and then do a buyback.

In the end you're betting on hash rates going up while we are expected to bet on them going down.
If they go up fast enough, you can buyback and reap the profits, otherwise you at least have some cash at hands early while loosing some of your ASICMINER dividends.

Reason for this:
Either I can (in front of a court, because apparently my PC was used to create thumb nails for Silk Road posts) give proof that I can NOT under any circumstances know or influence what kind of calculations were going on on my hardware - OR I need to make sure only legal stuff is happening there, either by offloading this to a trusted 3rd party (e.g. I trust that Apple only lets lawful content happen on their Appstore) or by auditing the available source code of the stuff that is supposed to run.

Anyways, your idea with distributed hosting sound a lot like Freenet, maybe take a look there too and also into the issues they have - and then think if adding money to the mix changes anything.

Ich hätte Interesse an einem der beiden Dell Monitore, hier noch ein paar Fragen (gleich öffentlich, vermutlich interessiert das noch andere auch):

* Nichtraucherhaushalt?
* Welche Revision?
* Kaufdatum (gibt's da noch Garantie)?
* Versand nach Österreich möglich?

Hier der 5 Jahre alte Test von prad.de: http://www.prad.de/new/monitore/test/2008/test-dell-3008wfp.html

Leider ist da der Stromverbrauch ja doch recht hoch, der aktuelle Nachfolger braucht da nur ~1/3...

Did you mean "Bitcoin trading became boring"?

Because Bitcoin is what happens outside of exchanges, not with the IOUs inside them!

XBT = µBTC, so 1 mXBT would be 0.1 Satoshi.

mBTC = 1kXBT or 1000 XBT.

You would need a working and audited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption scheme.
These are in the works (and very recently: https://github.com/shaih/HElib has been published) but probably still some time away.