I know when I started using MtGox (via Dwolla) there was no verification process from either company but that was back in 2011.  I do recall needing to be verified by both late 2012 or early 2013.  This makes me wonder though, if everyone was verified by BOTH sides, why was the Dwolla account frozen?  I understand they didn't have the licenses but they should be able to provide ample evidence that they did follow KYC and AML laws.  Makes me wonder if the DHS will eventually release those funds.

Not a chance.  They might scale it back but they won't pull the rug from under the house of cards.  They're going to keep printing because it's all they know.

If Bitcoin fails, I will be glad to have been part of an amazing technology and community that had a noticeable impact on the world.  Whether or not Bitcoin or some new incarnation down the road is the ultimate mass adopter, we are part of something transformative.

Reading the Ripple forums, it looks as though they promised a giveaway by the end of May and that has yet to happen.  If this is the case, I think this reflects negatively on the Company who should be doing everything under their power right now to build trust. It shouldn't be difficult to distribute a pre-mined product to a small beta user base.  If they're unable to do it at this scale, who's to say they can do it on a much grander one?

Full disclosure, I am not part of the giveaway and will receive nothing whether they pay out or not.

OP,

Just yesterday you were printing up flyers and calling yourself a Bitcoin consultant.  Today, you've done a complete 180 and are now saying Bitcoin will fail.  Unless you can point to some fundamental change in Bitcoin over the last 24 hours or so, it sounds like you're just venting your personal failed endeavors, not Bitcoin.

Government intervention was inevitable, the fact that it's playing out goes to show that Bitcoin is relevant.  I think some of the rewards that you and many others have reaped is because of the significant risk that was undertaken.  If you feel that risk is now significantly greater than the perceived reward, then you're right in liquidating.  But before you sell, ask yourself why you got into Bitcoin in the first place.  You already identified it as the "wild west" and were willing to lose everything you put in, so I think you've assessed the risk properly.  Does selling at this point change your life in any significant way?  To me, in a boom or bust proposition, that's exactly what you go for, the big boom or the unfortunate bust.  Anything in the middle isn't worthwhile settling for as you're cutting short the reward potentially being offered for the risk that you've already signed up for.

They'll only see it as inequitable if they believe your false assertions.  You have no idea how much Bitcoin's Silk Road, Voorhees, Ver, Satoshi or anyone else has.  "A few others" is an understatement to say the least.  How is the distribution of Bitcoin less than XRP, the vast majority of which is held by one corporation and its funders?

Equality in this context is complete crap anyway.  In all business ventures the creators and early adopters will always have an unequal share.  There's roughly another 10M BTC to be mined, no one is stopping anyone from grabbing their fair share.  Like I keep pointing out to you, the reaction you're getting is due to how you're spinning your answers.  You're not talking about the 10M BTC that's out there in the free market for anyone to obtain or that you can obtain free Bitcoin from numerous sites.  You're telling people they need to upfront $130, which isn't true, you can easily buy $1 of BTC as you can $1 of XRP.  And you could actually buy something with that $1 in BTC, the $1 in XRP only allows you to activate your account.

I don't know if you're genuinely trying to pitch both technologies to "newbs" or not, but if you are, I'm trying to show you why you're getting a more positive response to one over the other.  It has nothing to do with the technology, it has everything to do with your pitch.

I've been verified for a while so I don't recall the exact amount but you were able to deposit and withdraw small sums without previously being verified.  It appears now you will need to be verified to do any deposits or withdrawals.

Response to what?  I don't recall having a lengthy discussion with you so maybe you can point me to the thread you feel I'm avoiding. 

Nothing I said was erroneous.  Ripple facilitates IOU's between multiple parties.  IOU's = Debt.  There are zero repayment terms to these IOU's.  It doesn't matter if Ripple was built to track loans, Ripple is the facilitator of the loan.

It' just as accurate as this:


Which was my point.  He's purposely skewing his responses to show his own bias.

I agree with you that Bitcoin needs to continue to be evolved to be more user friendly for the average user but I think we've come great lengths in that aspect over the last few years.  As for the dialogue, your responses are rather biased and spun in a way to purposefully turn off a person looking at Bitcoin and entice someone looking at Ripple.  It's not difficult to do.

Q: "Who's got all those 100B Ripples?"
A: "A single for-profit organization holds the majority share.  Their profitability model is based on the appreciation of XRP and also control the distribution of said XRP."

Q: "Can I get some?"
A: "Sure, first you sign up for Ripple, which you can't use because you need XRP.  Then you need to sign up for a gateway and go through their approval process.  Then you want to fund the gateway with fiat.  Then you transfer the fiat to Ripple and place a bid to purchase XRP..."

Q: "What's the point of Ripple?"
A: "To loan money to another person with no repayment terms, interest, or any other sort of traditional terms, including legal recourse, you would receive when extending credit.  If you accept this rather significant counter-party risk, you can move DEBT all over the world."

What would be the average reaction if you spun it this way?  

Nice article.


 

Ripple only handles IOU's and their own crypto-currency or whatever you want to call it, which is not subject to FinCEN.  There's no exchange of actual fiat, in order to do that, you need to go through a gateway so I think the onus would be on the gateway to follow KYC and AML procedures. 

I wouldn't use quotes from companies that talk out of both sides of their mouth.  Paypal also said the Bitcoin user base is made up of "zealots and criminals."

I'm assuming he added the disclaimer at the start of the auction.  If so, then the bidders knew what they were getting into.  It's no different than putting a reserve price on an auction item up for bid. 

200+ useless posts in about a week.  It's pretty clear you're just flooding the forum with 1 liners in order to get your post count up, probably so you can eventually sell your sig for 0.1BTC.  Sad.

There's only 11.2 million BTC that have been mined to date so it stands to reason that it's not possible for adopters (plural) to have "stashes of millions of bitcoin."  Millions of dollars in Bitcoin, but not millions of Bitcoin.  Also, the blockchain is public ledger so you can see which addresses hold the most amount of coins.  Granted, an early adopter may own numerous "whale" addresses, but I think if you look them over, you'll still see it's not possible that a small handful of people are holding millions of coin.


Theoretically supply can go to zero but not practically.  Remember that Bitcoin is currently divisible to the 8th decimal (and this can be increased) so you shouldn't look at it as 21 million and no more.  The supply is fixed, this is true, but since you can divide each "coin" into fractional amounts, there's enough to service the world's needs if needed.


I think this is and will continue to be an evolving process as we are currently seeing with "dust" transactions.  Wider adoption means more miners and a stronger network so I think you need to account for the increase in network and infrastructure that would arise only in a mass adoption scenario.

It's a blanket statement to seize all of their funds commensurate with the amount allegedly to have been laundered.  LR doesn't have $6 billion in funds stashed in some account (or in aggregate).


http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/net-us-cybercrime-libertyreserve-charges-idUSBRE94R0KQ20130528

$6 billion didn't get seized, that's the estimated amount of transactions they're being accused of laundering since 2006.

Irrelevant?  Hardly.  Even OpenCoin would be foolish to agree with you as their whole profitability model is based around the hope that XRP is most definitely relevant.  If you look at the ripple network as a series of moving and interconnected gears, XRP is the grease.  No grease, those gears seize up and nothing moves, that's hardly trivial.