What's the use of this suggestion then? Either you have enough depth to anyways have a solid price that would be better than any suggestion you can come up with or you don't then you can suggest as much as you want, every bigger trade HAS to move the market.

Your "suggestions" currently only consist of a listing of some technologies and the promise that whytever you do will be Open Source.

Please answer the following questions:
How can I trust a completely new user that I don't know personally in your system?
How will it be better than Ripple + gateways?
Who will do dispute resolution, how and why should users trust these mediators/escrows?

If I create my own BTC IOUs I need to be trusted by others though, or I need to find a highly trusted gateway to deposit my coins.

Wouldn't that lead to more centralisation?! "Ideally" there's only 1 huge BTC gateway and everyone who wants to use BTC trusts it, kinda like MtGox. If there's any other gateway, the users with smallgateway-BTCs need to exchange them to the more trusted largegateway-BTCs... and if it really can be trusted would only show after a catastrophe, just like with pirateat40's "business".

Also even if I have highly trusted BTC IOUs in Ripple and I want to buy something at Merchant-X I need to exchange these BTC IOUs to something this merchant accepts (e.g. Amazon-USD-IOUs), I can't buy directly. Maybe Ripple will do conversion at an integrated exchange module on the spot in the future?

Well, Compared to banks however users can decide for themselves which debts they trust and which they don't.

Try not accepting USD from Goldman Sachs debts... with Ripple you could do that!


It is really not THAT hard to understand: Just as you get "IOUs" from MtGox when you deposit (they promise you to transfer you some USD or BTC in the future) you could also get IUOs from someone else. Once you realize that money (e.g. withdrawal request) then you erase the debt. Ripple just lets you trade this debt quicker and easier while still allowing anyone to redeem it. MtGox for example even issues these codes that let anyone redeem some value, Ripple is basically the same. You don't trade BTC there, you trade BTC redeemable on a certain gateway.

Instead of buying something that has been created out of thin air (Bitcoins) you can create "IOUs" from thin air of something you already have.

Ripple then allows you to track these and resolves debt circles (there's a story about a guy who goes to check out a hotel and puts down 100 EUR deposit, then the guy from the hotel pays the barkeeper etc. until he gets the money back, then the guest leaves the hotel again and takes the money with him) automatically.

A potential use case would be a Ripple gateway that allows you to deposit USD and hands you USDs tracked on Ripple instead. you can then trade these for example for BTC, EUR or anything else. The person who then gets these USD can either redeem them at the gateway (e.g. get a back transfer) or use them for something else.

As Ripple does not really use mining like Bitcoin (there is no real need for distributing currency randomly as everybody can create their own currencies and consensus comes from who you trust, it doesn't have to be global) they use their XRP currency as some kind of "postage stamp" for transactions - they get destroyed if you do a transaction. It seems that Opencoin (the ones who built the current implementation) want to sell these XRP to cover costs. Currently they are relatively rare as they are only obtainable by the "faucet" in this forum. I guess once Opencoin starts selling them though, they will be worth next to nothing and only serve as anti spam measure after all.

Ripple is as decentralized as it can get, one of the biggest issues atm is that they didn't yet open source the server code to be able to implement changes that would be equivalent to a hard fork in Bitcoin without requiring their community to follow and/or build consensus. The other issue is that all XRP coins were pre-mined and are currently held mostly by Opencoin.

Over 1.5k BTC available for short positions right now on Bitfinex...

...and also a LOT of USD for going long, though the bulls there again start their stampede and gobble up money like crazy.

I'd recommend to implement something along the lines of "non-final builds of bitcoin-qt need to have mainnet explicitly enabled, just like official releases need to enable testnet explicitly".

Might make it easier for people to try out stuff like this and minimizing potential losses of "real" coins.

A con would be of course that then there would be an artificial ecosystem and bugs with mainnet (like the "database heavy blocks" hard fork recently) might be lost. The main focus on these releases seems to be something else though anyways (checking if several pull requests cause strange effects with each other).

If you look at the pull requests this seems to be the case with bitcoin too... however the bot doesn't seem to build trunk + all pull requests at once, only trunk + single pull request.

I'm not too sure what to test with these binaries though, maybe if I "need" 2-3 features I can save on building time?

On a different note, is there a buildbot that one can run and that would somehow help devs? I don't mind donating some CPU time and space for a VM that builds and tests builds automatically in the background if it means having a better/more stable client...

Fixed, thanks!

Literal translations from German always sound weird, on the other hand the translation of "do you trust...?" could be "vertrauen Sie...?" instead of "haben Sie Vertrauen in...?" which is why I mentioned both the strange and the "correct" version.

Also I believe that people should vote for what they feel most comfortable with, not what might be percieved as the most beneficial for the community currently. What happens if a lot of people suddenly hear about BTC and start throwing money at it can be seen on the exchange rates of the last 3 months and the last 3 days.

Your translation is a bit off...

Question: "Haben Sie Vertrauen in das neue Internetgeld?"
Translation: "Do you trust the new internet money?" ("Do you have trust in the new internet money?")

Answer 3: "Ja, warum nicht? Schließlich muss man in jede Währung Vertrauen haben, auch in den Euro und den Dollar. Und wer kann schon garantieren, dass es diese Währungen ewig gibt?"
Translation: "Yes, why not? After all you need to trust every currency, even (also) the Euro and the US-Dollar. Also who can guarantee that these currencies will exist forever?"

The other answers are:
Answer 1: "Nein, auf keinen Fall. Schließlich gibt es auch keine Zentralbank, die dafür ihre Hand ins Feuer halten würde."
Translation: "No way. After all there is no central bank that would hold their hand in the fire for that [= that would take risks/give serious promises]"

Answer 2: "Vielleicht, allerdings kann man ja anhand der Wechselkursentwicklung sehen, dass man als Anleger extrem vorsichtig sein sollte. Sonst heißt es: "Wie gewonnen, so zerronnen!""
Translation: "Maybe, but looking at the development of the exchange rates you can see that you need to be very careful as investor. Otherwise it will be "easy earned, easy lost!"".

Die Coins sind jetzt schon um 2/3 gefallen gegenüber Anfang der Woche! Lieber alles verkaufen, wir werden alle störben!!!!

 

Im Ernst, ich hätte lange nicht geglaubt heuer auch nur die 100EUR zu sehen außerdem scheint sich das Ganze erstmal etwas zu beruhigen. Montag wird spannend, wenn die ganzen Überweisungen ankommen um günstige Coins abzugreifen...

Naja, so schwer ist das auch wieder nicht, auf Bitfinex liegt ca. ne halbe Million die sich jederzeit in MtGoxcodes wandeln lassen... allerdings kommt's ja auch darauf an dir zu trauen - und wenn du z.B. mir heute Euro überweist schickt alleine schon deine Bank das frühestens in 3 Tagen am Montag los.

Bitstamp dürfte eben so lange dauern wie SEPA dauert - 1 Banktag Transfer und ein bisschen Zeit für's gutschreiben auf den Exchangeaccount. Vor Montag liegt aber wohl eher das Problem bei deiner Bank - und reversible Sachen wie Kreditkarte oder Paypal sind aus vermutlich einleuchtenden Gründen in BTCkreisen nicht gerne gesehen.

1.) Shave cat
2.) Tatoo private key
3.) Wait for hair to regrow (keep kitty hidden inside during that time)
4.)
5.) Profit!

...and your general attitude sometimes.

Anyways, scammer gateways are a possibility, just like scammer Bitcoin exchanges. You however can choose to trust individual gateways and they can also trust each other if they want to.

Gateways would already fit into existing legislation concerning E-Money issuers, so it should be possible to actually open them up right now with existing laws. Something that is not too sure/safe with Bitcoin exchanges...

Hosted wallets...

And a possible useful feature would be to charge slightly more for something in BTC, do a market trade on an exchange to get the USD/EUR/WTF you want for whatever you're selling and return the remaining BTC along with the item. No need for Bitpay that way.

Not publishing transactions for X hours/minutes or setting an execution time in the future that would allow to cancel the transaction would help against "fat finger" errors. It wouldn't help against someone holding a private key without changes in the way transactions work - once someone has a private key, this person can do whatever they want with the coins that are associated with it.

You can arbitrarily limit yourself but not a determined attacker.

Eventuell von jemandem bitstamp oder MtGox codes kaufen, oder gleich OTC traden. VirVoX dürfte auch schnell gehen, aber ist mit vielen Fees verbunden. Generell sind Fiattransaktionen nun mal viel langsamer als BTC, daher sind crashes auch immer so flott und halten erstmal ein Wochenende an.

Thanks, I still need a kinda reliable IP for NMC and testnet2, the included one that you quote is pingable but doesn't seem to accept my connection (didn't really debug it further). Also TRC seems to be stuck at block 101632 - either the chain is dead or something's stuck somehow.

Not reserved, I double post just because I'm that cool!