Me too, thanks! (I asume this address belongs to ASICMINER: 16avRT1SdM3hJ8u6QHaE6ZMVbCPgik4RF5)

If I understand it correctly, every participant can be a gateway and issue IOUs (though not sure how to do it, perhaps need to use something else in addition to existing javascript client). So it is not that centralized. I can imagine the network, where people exchange IOUs without touching the actual money and without involving any bank transfers.

Update: moreover it can be used to exchange cryptocurrencies, so there is no hard need in banks at all.

Update2: so I think Ripple has great future, but I wouldn't use XRP as store of value, I believe it is overpriced currently, considering how much belongs to OpenCoin and how much will be given away to hundreds of thousands of newcomers that are needed for success of the system.

Sorry for a noob question... How do I verify that I actually own the bought shares now... Is there any public list of shareholders?

Hi!

I just developed a tiny simple service that synthesizes sounds in real time using mtgox socket API.

The aim is to give you (and me) a feeling of the current market situation: loud sounds mean higher volumes, higher pitch means growth.

Here is the link: http://ansrv.com/listen_mtgox/

You can use it in the background and feel what is happening without even watching the charts, or you can use it together with Clark Moody's realtime charts. It may take some before you start recognizing the signals.

If people find it useful, I will probably improve it, make github repository, etc.

PS: I wanted to do it long ago, but when I saw listentobitcoin.com, it motivated me and gave some technical hints, thanks!

+1

Is there any reason to use both? Is there any advantage in proof-of-work over consensus?

Ripple doesn't look like scam, too much effort put into it by quite a reputable community members, they have official company registered to do it, and the idea is very promising.

It's great that more people will understand nature of money they use everyday (most of them are in fact IOUs).

So we have potentially decentralized alternative to the current financial system (IOUs and XRPs are alternatives for fiat money, BTCs - alternative for gold).

I don't quite understand how the Ripple protocol works though, how scalable, secure and reliable it is.

I am curious if there is any advantage of Proof-of-work vs Consensus. Is it possible for Bitcoin to adapt "consensus" mechanism from Ripple to allow instant secure payments?

2.92 sent to 1Bt9fKZeP28Gxu9NHPpVsMyduLxG5EP2fb

265a8c475c72

So they do a favor to bitcoin holders. Thanks, Wired!

Ripple has one strong advantage: nearly instant transactions. I wonder if Bitcoin can be improved to use similar consensus mechanism to enable safe 0-confirmations transactions.

2 @ 1.46

When volumes are low, manipulators can draw whatever price they like. Why don't they do it? It's boring...

I think Billionaires would love Bitcoin.

Firstly, their capital will belong to them, they won't need to feed bureaucracy and to take "social responsibility" for its failures.

Secondly, they can buy a significant part of future world economy just for few millions of dollars right now (even if they loose it - not a big deal, they'll still be in power anyway).

I think bureaucracy and state employees with high salaries and social benefits are the ones that would really hate Bitcoin.

Well, it does come from our profit, and our profit comes from advertisers' expenses. Or you can say that our profit comes from publishers' income, and publisher's income comes from advertisers' expenses. Isn't it the same?


We don't sell impressions, we just redirect advertisers' money to publishers for a fee. And advertisers receive proportional share of impressions from publishers they pay to.


I regret that our fees repel advertisers. I do appreciate your sincere feedback though, there is something to think about. You identified 2 major problems:

1) fees for default use case are high

2) people don't understand how it works.

Possible solutions: decrease the fees, redesign the system and/or improve documentation.

But please understand why those problems came up. They are related to "anonymous" nature of our service. We don't want to spy on our visitors, to identify/ban our publishers and to filter out their traffic.

We want to encourage advertisers to use non-default use case thus reducing their fees and improving quality of traffic.

If we just redistribute money without any feedback from advertisers, we'll end up with 100% botnet generated traffic. So we need advertisers to reward publishers for conversions. And that is why we charge ridiculous fees on the ones that don't.

But please note, that unless many advertisers reward for sales, all advertisers are in equal position. So it is not advertisers who suffer from high fees, it is the publishers who earn less.

Advertiser will suffer from high fees only if s/he don't use goal tracking (i. e. pays additional 20% fee) and competes with advertisers who do use it (i. e. save on fees and receive higher quality traffic). But currently rewards for goals are less than 10%, so even default use case shouldn't be that bad.

Looks like you forgot to specify email address

We don't pay per impression, we just redistribute advertisers' money, so your income depends on how that money are distributed. So either advertisers decide to reward you for some reason (e.g. your visitors bought from them), or you fit their targeting parameters and generate unique traffic. According to stats page, only ~4% of earnings come from goals (i. e. rewards) currently. So looks like currently quality of traffic is not as important as its category/language/volume. I hope it changes though.


Yes, sounds right, each grouping could belong to 3 categories.

I feel like there is some misunderstanding here. What is publishers' profits, where do they come from? Publishers don't deposit anything, it is advertisers' money anyway.


We know our fee is high, but it is not 40%. As I said, it is 10-36% depending on the particular use case.

We take a deposit fee of 20%, half of it is a reward for publisher that attracted advertiser.

Then we distribute remaining 80% to ad units that satisfy advertiser's criteria (with respect to Daily Budget set by advertiser) and take 20% fee from it. In return advertiser receives proportional share of impressions of those ad units.

But advertiser can set Daily Budget to 0 and spend campaign's balance via Goal Tracking API without that 20% fee.

So the principle is simple: money gets distributed from advertisers to publishers (either we distribute it according to some simple internal algorithm for a 20% fee, or advertisers distribute them via Goal Tracking API without a fee). In return advertisers get proportional share of impressions from ad units they pay to. No absolute numbers of clicks/impressions are guaranteed though, CPC and CPI are just rough estimates.

Also if advertiser is at the same time a publisher, then instead of depositing money s/he can redirect his earnings to campaign with only a 10% fee.

Thus minimum fees we take from advertiser is 10%, maximum is 36% and our fee model encourages advertisers to reward ad units that work best for them thus minimizing incentive for fake traffic. But we might consider to change it.

Thanks for your feedback!

Just choose 3 categories that better describe your audience. The reason to select categories is to have a better match of your ad places with advertisers' ads (thus potentially increasing your income). The most paying categories currently are Bitcoin/Gamblers and Bitcoin/Miners. Many advertisers compete for them. But if miners & gamblers don't visit your sites, then efficiency of your ad units will be low and you won't earn rewards from advertisers.


They are not actually, we use that URL just to show advertisers that ad unit is really embedded somewhere. You have few options:
1) register ad unit of type "Other" (and explain in description that it will be use in various sites), then no need to specify URL
2) register ad unit for 1 URL, but embed them in all domains (also you can create a special page that lists all your domains and claims that this ad unit will be shown there).


What's the difference? Please note that advertisers don't pay per click or per impression. They just send their money to publishers via AnonymousAds, and get a proportional share of their impressions (no matter what the absolute amount of clicks/impressions are).

But you are right, fees are quite noticeable, 10-36% depending on the specific use case. Normally AnonymousAds takes 20% from deposits (half of them goes to referrers thus encouraging efficient publishers) and 20% from daily budget (though you can set daily budget to 0 and use Goal Tracking API to distribute campaign's balance between efficient publishers without a fee).

Thanks for your questions and for interest in AnonymousAds!

1. When you put your ad unit in category, you get advertisers that select that category or any upper level category (including the root category). Advertisers compete with their money for the share of impressions, some of them concentrate on particular ad units or subcategories, but most of them don't.

Regarding earnings...

Publishers' earnings are just money paid by advertisers. Advertisers pay to ad units either explicitly via Goal Tracking, or indirectly via Daily Budget, and only after that they possibly receive impressions. Publishers embed their ad code and only after that they possibly get advertisers. Nothing is guaranteed and you can see that traffic and earnings fluctuate.

AnonymousAds distributes money to ad units in small fractions with respect to their unique traffic. Thus it needs some time to get statistics and it doesn't send money to ad units that don't generate globally unique traffic every day (unless advertisers reward those ad units via Goal Tracking API). In the long term quality & targeting of traffic can affect earnings since some advertisers do reward for sales.

2. Yes, you can either use 1 ad unit (easy, frequent payouts), or you can create 1 ad unit per domain (better targeting & income, but payouts are tiny and less frequent). Unfortunately AnonymousAds doesn't combine payments currently, but I know it should be implemented.