But there are no miners in Ripple. The Ripple equivalent to a validator is a regular Bitcoin client that relays transactions between nodes. Those people aren't paid.

The difference in work to run a validator versus running a tracking server is nearly zero. It's just a few extra signature operations. People will run tracking servers because that assures them immediate access to everything on the Ripple network. They will relay and process because, unless they pull their weight, they will have to rely on the altruism of others for access to the network. If altruism is unreliable, then people *will* run validators because otherwise, they'll have to rely on altruism.

Some gateways will probably act as vaildators. Not every validator has to.

"Ripple is bad because it lets people do bad things." If Ripple was a hammer, you would forecast people having sore thumbs.

So you think that Ripple will replace the entire multi-trillion dollar fiat economy with a crypto-currency that cannot be inflated, and that's bad because it'll make some people rich. Gotcha.

We can't predict the future and it makes no sense for us to commit to a plan that prevents us from adapting to changing circumstances. We currently expect to give 50 billion away to drive adoption.

We can't release the code for people to review and ignore input. If we ignored input, we'd be in the minority and be ignored. Ripple is based on consensus. As soon as the code is open sourced, other people start running validators, and people start trusting those validators, the network will be run by that consensus. We can make suggestions, but if they are rejected by that consensus, if we follow them, we will be ignored just like any Bitcoin transaction that doesn't meet the rules is ignored.

Because as soon as the source code is open, we have to obtain a community consensus on every change that affects the way a transaction is processed. That would slow down our development tremendously.

No, because code is not the only form of proof.

We will and for just that reason. We have a list of things that need to get done before the server code can be open sourced and we're running down that list as quickly as we can.

You're talking hunreds of years down the road, maybe thousands. But if that ever happens, the stakeholders at that time might make XRP more divisible, they might make every XRP into 1,000 "new-XRP". Who knows, they might even make more XRP. People in the future can solve their problems however they think is best.

No, because the community will probably drop them by consensus. But, yes, if people want that to happen, then it will happen. Nothing can stop people from doing dumb things if they want to.

Why? Dumping will push the price way down. That doesn't make economic sense. Yes, OpenCoin could do that, but it would be against their interests.

You are assuming OpenCoin will be a Ripple central authority forever. That is absolutely not our plan.

No. Garbage in, garbage out. Is it a bug in the forums that I can make them say: 2 + 2 = 5

If you tell it to consider something worthless to be worth 1 trillion BTC, then it will tell you that you have something worth 1 trillion BTC. And, worse, it will trade something worth 1 BTC to get it, causing you to lose 1 BTC. It does what you ask it to do. If you tell it do something stupid, it can hurt you.

Ripple is a trading and payment platform. You have to tell it what assets are worth because it has no way to know otherwise. There are no central authorities to set exchange rates or tell you what assets are really worth.

As I said above, "this really is just a question of whether people are ready for access to powerful financial tools that permit pseudonymous transactions that are irreversible or whether people are just too dumb and careless to be trusted with that kind of power and will only hurt themselves."

Ripple cannot always guarantee that you will be able to trade what you have for what you want. It will do its best to allow you to do so if there is someone else who has what you want and wants what you have, or some combination of people who can make that path work. Whatever you have, likely nobody is willing to trade it for a Bitcoin at BitStamp. People are only obligated to do what they have agreed to do.

If you want to be guaranteed that your Bitcoins will be accepted by Bitstamp, then ensure your only Bitcoin pathway is to Bitstamp. Then anyone who wants to pay you has to solve this problem for you. You get to decide what assets you hold.

A pool won't give you shares for mining for yourself. You don't know in advance whether you're going to find a block, a share, or nothing at all.

I've spent much time head scratching about this problem for over a year now. It ties into all kinds of things that would be awesome to do with both Bitcoin and Ripple. It's not impossible to solve, it's just that there's no really good solution (at least as far as I know). They're full of compromises. That doesn't mean you can't make the idea work, it just won't work nearly as well as you might imagine.

I don't see how that could work. In order for a miner to mine, they have to know what the longest valid chain is. How will they know which chain is valid if they can't validate all the transactions in it? This sounds like a recipe for forks galore.

Are you suggesting there be a separate hash chain for each currency pair? Because if not, you can't trade at all unless you can tell what the longest valid hash chain is. And you can't do that unless you can determine if a block is valid or not. And you can't do that if you can't validate every type of transaction the network supports.

It's true you could defer this to some other server. But if you're going to have only one block chain for the exchange system (which I think you want, otherwise you're mining all different coins with different rates) then every miner and non-light client will need to validate transaction on every other block chain the system supports conversions with. That means either synchronizing to that block chain as well or having another server they can trust to get information about that other block chain.

It also means that if any other system is broken, this one will be broken too. For example, if Bitcoin has another fork, then basecoin nodes will disagree over which bitcoin transactions are valid and thus disagree over which is the longest valid chain. So it will only be as strong as the weakest coin it supports.

It can, but then what does it do? It's not like the network as a whole can sign a transaction. Bitcoin-like payment systems rely on self-contained, objective rules for determining if a transaction is valid or not. The longest chain consisting only of valid transactions is what wins. You can't really expect every node to have the full history of every other crypto-currency in order to know that the payments were made in some other blockchain.

I've been working for some time on finding really good solutions to this problem. Still no luck. It's not impossible, it's just that every solution has painful compromises.

It's basically equivalent to being able to take Bitcoins off the block chain, trade them on another block chain, and then release them to their new owner on the original block chain. If we could do that, we could have high-speed side chains that we throw away every year.

This is the tricky part. This is not impossible, but there is no very good way to do it that I know of and all the ways have weird quirks and downsides.

Does Bitcoin have a bug because if someone convinces you to send your Bitcoin to their account, you lose them? If people aren't able to safely use powerful tools, then the world is not ready for either Ripple or Bitcoin.

I'm a pretty sophisticated user, and every time I send Bitcoins, I admit I have this moment of panic where I wonder if I've done everything exactly right because I know that if I cut/pasted the wrong account or made some other similar mistake, my money is gone. While we can do some work to make both systems safer, this really is just a question of whether people are ready for access to powerful financial tools that permit pseudonymous transactions that are irreversible or whether people are just too dumb and careless to be trusted with that kind of power and will only hurt themselves.

It's not a simple question.

I think I answered these the last time you asked them: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201794.msg2131884#msg2131884

We will do what we can to drive adoption. Most of that will probably involve encouraging and assisting others. We plan to continue to develop client and server software for as long as necessary.

Yes, that's not a problem.

If you mean literally can I do it, no, I don't have access to the modify the web pages. If you mean do I think it would be a good idea to do that, I think it's not. The biggest difference between Ripple and every other payment network is that Ripple is much more open than other payment networks. As far as it being deceptive, the view that "open" means "open source" is, so far as I know, not a view that anyone actually holds.

The price of XRP is just a matter of supply and demand. We believe that broad adoption of Ripple as a payment platform will drive demand.

We don't currently plan to do anything but develop and promote the Ripple payment network.

The genesis ledger puts a configurable number of XRPs in a well-known account. This is the only way XRPs can be "generated".

Right now, the only thing stopping OpenCoin from printing more XRP is the fact that we have not created any method to do so, have promised not to create any method of doing so, and doing so would open us up to dozens of lawsuits. The only way to do so would be to get the majority of validators to agree to the change, and even then it's possible (in fact, I hope this would happen) a stubborn minority could split the ledger and ultimately win. So once the network is distributed, this is as difficult as raising the Bitcoin block reward.

The network is broken if there is no network consensus ledger. If there is a network consensus ledger, Charlie can't join anything without signing it. (This isn't 100% true, but the effect is the same. He can actually join slightly before he signs it, but only by participating with existing validators in figuring out the next network consensus ledger following a valid one.)

See my "agreement room" analogy. You can't validate until you walk in the room. You can't walk in the room without agreeing with those already in it.

The protocol is documented in the client source code, in the wiki, and most of the gaps can be figured out by simply looking at existing transactions and their effects. (Each transaction is published along with precisely what changes it made.) I agree the documentation could be a lot better, but I don't think you'll find people who have questions about the protocol that haven't been answered.

With the vast majority of other payment systems, not only is there no documentation of their internal protocol but even if you knew their internal protocol, you still could neither see nor submit a transaction. With Ripple, anyone can see any transaction and anyone can submit a transaction and if it meets objective criteria, it will be processed.

The UNL determine which validators you listen to.

It sounds like you're asking if horribly broken inputs will produce horribly broken outputs. The answer is yes.