Would there be anything wrong with embedding just a hash of a message to the blockchain, for timestamping purposes?

Maybe even the people with large stashes of BTC, since its value will drop rapidly as people try to cash out. Innovating on top of Bitcoin could be a way to preserve the value. Even if the core protocol of Bitcoin were to need modifications to allow Ripple-like functionality, it could be done through proof of burn, keeping the exchange rate fixed at 1:1 for a predetermined period.

Agreed. On the flip side, if Ripple ever does look like overtaking Bitcoin, it will give those with large stashes of BTC an incentive to facilitate development of a rival system based purely on Bitcoin. Competition is good, it will drive prices down, drive innovation and keep everyone honest.

I guess some people dislike Ripple because they worry it might rob them of their chance to strike it rich with their cheaply acquired or self-mined BTC. They feel like co-owners of Bitcoin, and they feel they can only be users of Ripple, not co-owners. It's an invalid argument, but I think that's what's behind it. I'm not talking about user "bitchess" here BTW.

Check out Ripple.com. Soon, it could be the best way to exchange BTC for fiat currency. That may be one of the first steps towards wider adoption of BTC.

Exactly. In fact, I think Ripple is going to be enormously helpful for the wider adoption of Bitcoin.

Agreed, but extending trust to your friends would be much less problematic. I don't see anything problematic there.

But if you only use it as a BTC / fiat exchange, then you'll be able to benefit from it greatly.

If product / service and labour markets are flexible this isn't a problem and you don't need transfer payments. Bitcoin will have a completely fixed money supply, so if you want socialism and transfer payments, you'd better support something else.

The system is physically distributed, but logically (or virtually) a unified whole. All nodes have a unified view of the ledger, and the consensus process takes much less time than with Bitcoin. The "ledger" also contains the order book. I don't see how this system could support very high-frequency trading, but I'm not sure that's actually useful. If it is, specialised exchanges could serve that market with their own privately developed order book and still be connected to the Ripple network.

Prices do indeed differ, what is true is that labour markets are rigged, which means it is difficult for nominal wages to decrease. Inflation caused by printing money still causes real wages to decrease, but it's not a good substitute for having sound money. And labour laws are mostly a responsibility of the individual member states.

That was not the cause. Bad monetary policy is, well, bad and the only good monetary policy may be not to have one, but that didn't cause the banks to fail. Failing oversight is what caused the banks to fail. Or to grow to be too large to fail before failing. Effective oversight (whether through market forces or effective government oversight) would have prevented the problem. Ineffective oversight would have caused it regardless of what the EU did. Ineffective oversight is the deciding factor, and that is a purely Cypriot responsibility.

Bad monetary policy also didn't cause the economic mess in general. A solvability crisis doesn't help, but Europe's labour and services markets are still very rigid and rigged. That's socialism for you.

Exactly, deposit insurance is a bad idea. It only exists to lull people into a false sense of security, so that banks can continue to play their fractional reserve games.

Maybe that's because there wasn't one. Or because you explained it badly.

I wouldn't say it sucks, I have high hopes for it, but it all depends on whether OpenCoin releases the source code and manages the process of distributing XRP well. It would seem to be in their interest to do so, but only time wil tell.


Not 'shitty' at all. You don't even have to use gateways at all if you are willing to rely on your trust graph. Settlement could be done purely in BTC and cash if that's what you wanted. And even if you do use a gateway, you don't have to settle every transaction.


Gateways are professional issuers of IOUs, but anyone can act as an ad-hoc issuer with their friends. It extends the reach of anonymous cash transactions.

The stupid, it hurts.

Well, it depends on it in the sense that you need to make small deposits in XRP to open an account and to access various functionalities, but not in the sense that you need to convert IOUs to XRP to make payments. Since the amounts involved are only small, I'd say it's almost true it doesn't depend on XRP.

There is no exchange rate risk if you make payments in fiat currency IOUs, but then there is counterparty risk. That can be managed, but it's there. If you make payments in XRP (or in BTC outside the Ripple system), then there is no counterparty risk, but you do have exchange rate risk.

It will be a distributed exchange, and therefore much more resistant to DDoS or government shutdowns than Mt Gox.


Traditional electronic fiat currencies are IOUs too, you have to trust that your bank will redeem your balance in real dollars. An electronic ledger is no more than a record, it cannot enforce settlement in a real world currency. When you trade BTC for USD on Mt Gox you are effectively trading Mt Gox issued BTC IOUs for Mt Gox issued USD IOUs.

One of the interesting things about Ripple is that it allows you to specify explicit trust lines. All nodes you can reach through these lines can pay you and you can pay them, and you don't need any banks or governments to do it. Each party settles with his or her direct neighbours periodically, in whatever form is convenient. As adoption increases, you'd have to settle less and less frequently, because more and more companies would accept payment through Ripple.

I expect Ripple to become more reliable, resilient, anonymous and liquid than Mt Gox.


Just playing around with it for now. If I'm going to buy any new BTC, it's likely going to be through Ripple. I won't hold large amounts of XRP or IOUs in the Ripple system until after the code is open sourced, gateways have proven their creditworthiness and many others than OpenCoin are running validators.

I'm more worried about the possibility that governments around the world would ban private possession of ASIC mining rigs and would deploy large farms themselves. There are only so many places in the world where you can fabricate ASICs, so that would make them easy for governments to controls. Also, by definition ASICs are application-specific, so there would be no fallout on other applications.

I'd look for a hashing algorithm for which ASICs offer less than an order of magnitude improvement over at least FPGAs, which cannot be suppressed. No such improvement over GPUs would be even better and ideally ordinary desktop PCs should be competitive. Surely it must be possible to find a hashing function that requires the full functionality of a general purpose CPU.