Don't you still need to validate enough to be able to collect the fees and stop spammers?

There's another site that does this: https://www.btproof.com/

Both look like small one man projects though.

It would grow more slowly, but could not be eradicated completely, unless you managed to take away military grade cryptography from the people. That would require turning the US into a draconian police state, and even that might not be enough, as the example of Iran shows.

If individuals manage to maintain access to the internet and the use of military grade open source cryptography both on the internet and offline, then this will have tremendous consequences, both good and bad. Cryptography, like nuclear weapons, will change the rules of the game forever, whether we like it or not. It will enable totally untraceable digital cash. David Chaum has shown this is mathematically possible, and the fact that Bitcoin has shown a grassroots P2P open source currency is possible, makes it inevitable. Also, just like nuclear weapons, cryptography cannot be uninvented, and by the Streisand effect it cannot be taken off the internet without shutting down the entire internet. At a minimum, governments will be just as unable to eradicate Bitcoin as they have been unable to eradicate the drugs trade and money laundering.

So, cryptography has great consequences, and it will take draconian repression to try to stop it, and in the end, people aren't going to accept draconian repression. Nevertheless it's going to be a long, hard struggle to maintain our liberties. Society doesn't yet realise that it will have to choose between tyranny and radical freedom. The power of cryptography does not allow for a compromise position. It's not so much that more reasonable compromises cannot be thought of, it's that they cannot be enforced. Any enforcement action that can counteract the power of cryptography requires draconian repression, and is therefore by definition incompatible with a compromise position. See http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm.

Nevertheless, politicians and society at large will instinctively seek a compromise position, and it will take time for them to realise that there isn't one. Unfortunately, that means that they will initially be unwittingly supporting the move towards tyranny, until they finally realise what's going on. What we in the Bitcoin community can do is to try to speed this process along. The sooner people realise that the world has changed, the less collateral damage there will be.

More than enough to open a Ripple account, establish trust lines with some gateways or individuals you know (and trust!), and start buying or selling Bitcoin against fiat money.

Why are addresses calculated from a hash of the public key, rather than using the public key itself? I understand why you would want to add a checksum to guard against typos, but why not append the checksum to the public key rather than its hash? Is it merely a matter of wanting to make the address shorter or is there a deeper reason?

Both Ripple and OT are great for buying and selling Bitcoin, which is a hugely important issue for Bitcoin. The discussion should stay right here. Discussion of XRP on the other hand could move elsewhere.

But exchanging between fiat and crypto is a killer application, I don't find it surprising people are focusing on it.

It would only be a step backward if the IOU system was all there was, but it isn't, there is also XRP, which is a (small) step forward compared to BTC. More importantly, the IOU system combined with the distributed exchange is a major leap forward compared to Mt Gox and its competitors. So in effect Ripple is a huge step forward, and not a step backward.

Only as long as you manage to stay anonymous. Otherwise governments can still confiscate any other assets you have. I don't think there is a master plan to try to control Bitcoin yet, what we're seeing is merely low level bureaucrats involved with combating money laundering doing their jobs. But there will be a plan, and part of it will be to gather as many identities behind Bitcoin addresses as possible. And then to pressure people into revealing the identities behind the addresses they've sent BTC to. This could be done simply by taxing all funds that have passed through a known address until the owner reveals who he's made the payment to, then by adding fines, then taint analysis and blacklists etc etc.

I disagree with the statement that this is the "point" of Ripple.

It won't really do that if governments find out the identities behind enough addresses. They're well on their way towards doing that, even though it probably isn't part of a master plan - yet.

Well, that sucks. Bitstamp really need to get their act together, they are pissing off their customers.

Very interesting stuff, it's going to take some time to digest all of this.

Ah, I see.

So what information does the recovery request contain, and what information do the pool members have to verify the situation?

What happens if the server fails to sign?

Can you explain how the bail-out request works? I recall reading detailed human-language transcripts of all the transactions that are involved, either on your wiki or on some of the sites it points to. I don't have a good picture of the differences between OT on the one hand and Loom, Lucre, and all the other concepts it uses / borrows from.

I'm still trying to figure out how your system works, so the question may turn out to be meaningless. But I was wondering if there is a way to let a Bitcoin script verify that a person is authorised to redeem BTC from a backing account when presented with appropriately signed evidence.

Is there a way to prevent the need for voting by somehow putting the logic inside a Bitcoin script, perhaps with new opcodes if necessary?

Why don't you let him start his own thread and delete his posts here?