I have a friend trying to active his wallet. I sent him 250 XRP but he says his Ripple client is reporting "Offline". He sent me his secret key and I can open the wallet from my machine.

Any idea what that might mean?

EDIT

He managed to get it to work from his laptop. But not his Galaxy Note 2.

How do I send the entire balance to another account and close that ledger entry? The wallet is not useful anymore now that two people have the "secret" right?

Thank you! I did not know that.

Anyone know what bank WeExchange uses?

Thanks for the great info!

Anyone else have any experiences?

@joelkatz, I have a friend trying to active his wallet. I sent him 250 XRP but he says his Ripple client is reporting "Offline". He sent me his secret key and I can open the wallet from my machine.

Any idea what that might mean?

EDIT

How do I send the entire balance to another account and close that ledger entry? The wallet is not useful anymore now that two people have the "secret" right?

Yes, we get it. You've said that enough it sounds like a childish tantrum.


I'm fine. YOU cannot establish trust without that. Good for you! Off I go now! Bye bye.

I need to choose a Ripple Gateway trustworthy enough to hold $10's of USD for me while I test out Ripple. I have no experience with any existing BTC exchanges/counter parties.

So my open question is? Who do you trust? Tell me your GOOD experiences? No flame wars please.

How is it hand wavy to recommend you only TRUST OpenCoin enough to ask for Ripple's equivalent of an "invite to their closed beta"?

That is exactly how much I trust OpenCoin.

I don't. I trust a currently centralized currency that is not distributed at all yet.
I trust it implicitly because I have ZERO at risk with OpenCoin. They gave me all the XRP I'll ever need. If they shut the whole project down tomorrow I would lose nothing. The same will be true of the majority of their potential customers/users.

These facts cannot change for me over time. My only risk is in choosing to trust a particular Gateway to hold my USD.

Right now I have enough XRP to make 1,700,000,000 PayPal like USD transactions. However, now I need to find a Ripple Gateway I trust to hold USD for me. That is where my worries lie. (my counter party risk is here) Not with OpenCoin.

Does anybody have any personal experiences with any of the current Ripple Gateway operators?

Just to be clear bitchess, I DO NOT recommend you or anyone else buy XRP and hold them like you hold BTC. I also do not recommend that anybody EVER buy XRP to speculate on its price. Ever. Period. That is not what XRP is for. Speculative trading in XRP will not make anyone rich EXCEPT OpenCoin founders. It should be clear to the casual observer that OpenCoin can manipulate the exchange price of XRP at will by rapidly adjusting/constricting supply. It is also clear that they will be GIVING AWAY XRP FOR FREE for a long time to come.

I do, however, recommend you personally *acquire* enough XRP to activate two addresses. Then send some XRP back and forth to yourself. I think the minimum amount of XRP required to test out those features is about 150 XRP right now.

What's the best way to *acquire* XRP? Make an address and add it to OpenMarket's Free XRP thread. That gave me 20,000 XRP but it took a day or two to receive them. I was impatient so I asked an OpenCoiner for some in order to test. He gave me a few hundred. FULL DISCLOSURE: I don't expect to EVER buy XRP to use for saving or for spending directly. I will keep some around to use to pay transaction fees. From my experience, the current transaction fee is 0.00001 XRP/transaction. This does not seem to change relative to the amount of XRP send in a transaction.

Technically, what you propose can be done. I imagine it will be done (with appropriate warnings) once the server software is released. Read my post on eDonkey2000 (above) to grasp the potential consequences of easy/automatic upgrading.

As for why not now. I'm presuming this is OpenCoin's beta period. Beta is a time allotted for potential real world customers to bash on the system and report bugs. This allow OpenCoin to make the system as stable as possible for it's actual P2P FULL release.

Thank you for answering! That sounds quite sensible to me.

@bitchess, there are a group of us discussing similar ideas under the concept name StableCoin <-- not a real coin. That is a site searchable term we've coined for #2 with an option of #1. You might want to introduce yourself in this thread.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179918.0

Do you write code?

When you run a Ripple peer, every transaction gets copied to your machine just like running a bitcoin peer. If you have the code, and the data. You have total control. Unless the data is somehow encrypted by your secret server. But that would be detected as soon as someone ran their own Ripple peer.

What you are suspicious of, technically, cannot be done. Unless you are presuming that Ripple will never decentralize their system. (Ripple will own EVERY node)

In that case this conversation is pointless.

The concise answer is: it is impossible to maintain control through the code, when someone else possesses physical control of their own code. They could write some kill switch into the original code. Source code hackers could just comment it out and re-compile.

You can only maintain a "kill-switch" kind of feature if your product is closed source. There is not a chance in hell that Ripple would take that chance.

HOWEVER, my explanation requires a non-concise story...

Oh! That question. Give me a minute. And I will respond directly.

Edit: My response will probably cause more controversy than the OP.

FATAL ERROR! I didn't mean to slander Liberty Reserve. I meant to reference Liberty Dollar! I
edited the post above to correct my mistake. My apologies to everyone at Liberty Reserve.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/25/us/liberty-dollar-creator-awaits-his-fate-behind-bars.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Such is life.

But let me point out that you should find my, a random stranger's, opinion less trustworthy than a founder of Ripple's opinion.

I really can't be offended by that.

FATAL ERROR! I didn't mean to slander Liberty Reserve. I meant to reference Liberty Dollar! I'm changing this post now... Changed. My apologies to everyone at Liberty Reserve.



Yes, I am 100% convinced, 1) they will release the source code, 2) they will not be able to *manipulate* the rules once they have done so. The rules will always be changeable (as they are with bitcoin). But it will require near 100% community approval (as with bitcoin).

The main reason I'm so certain (i.e. the Satoshi reason) is because the less the formal control Ripple has over the rules of the system, the better the chances they don't get prosecuted for forgery like the Liberty Dollar guy.


That is the beauty of their plan. They don't need to manipulate the network ever. I'm going to answer this concisely in this post and I'll give an extended answer in my next...

Owning all the XRP (as they do now) implies that they can manipulate the market price of XRP at will. I presumed that they would do so in order to preserve a SteadyCoin like value for XRP. I just had no idea of what steady target value they saw as their StableTarget.

To me it seemed "intuitively obvious" their goal was to be able to have *external* USD/XRP exchanges, along with euro/XRP yen/XRP rupee/XRP ... etc.  People would physically give or electronically transfer USD to their preferred gateway and that gateway would exchange it for XRP that you would hold in your Ripple address (a la bitcoin). Then when you would send the XRP to another address (a la bitcoin). Then the person you send it to could convert it to euro, yen, rupee... etc. using their preferred gateway.

Duh! Right?

To make that system work pretty much REQUIRES keeping the value of XRP stable (SteadyCoin). Otherwise, people wouldn't be able to PERCEIVE their XRP as being EQUAL to USD. Again, Duh! Right? The *evil brilliance* of that plan is that maintaining the perceived stability of the system REQUIRES them to sell their boundless stash of XRP as necessary to compensate for increased demand for XRP as Ripple user base increases. Right? Brilliant! Right?

Wrong. It turns out thats how morons like me and Liberty Dollar would implement the system. They have a name for that in the USA. We call it FORGERY. The government has secret agents to put a stop to that. They're called "The Secret Service". Ask the Liberty Dollar guy.

No. What a truly F...ing, genius level, Satoshi level, BRILLIANCE would do.... would be... wait for it...

Convert from USD/XRP at market rates *and* XRP/euro, yen, rupee...etc. at market rates... wait for it...

INSTANTANEOUSLY! All in one, F...ing, single transaction. Holy Shit! as they say. It's Madness and I'm One Step Behind! That way Ripple (the company) doesn't have to give a flying F... about what the market rate for XRP is.

Better still, Ripple owners holding so much XRP give the perceptions that they can manipulate the market price at will (They can). Thereby reducing most people's urge to speculate in XRP (a la bitcoin). The fewer people who perceive XRP as equivalent to the USD the better for Ripple (the company) and its founders. The last place they want to be standing is next to the Liberty Dollar guy. The more people who perceive XRP as inflationary the better as well. Being guaranteed inflationary means that selling XRP can't possibly be perceived as an investment scam (except on this web site) nor as a Ponzi scheme.

There! How's that for CONCISE.


They don't. They don't have to care. To Ripple BTC is just yet another externally issued currency. Inside Ripple you can have as many of those as you want. I could be a Cheese Burgers gateway in Ripple if I saw a market. Someone in Russia could send 500 rubles to me in Cheese Burgers and I could take delivery in the USA.

Ripple changes F...ing everything.