My guess is because it's still in beta.

As a public service announcement for others reading this ...

If you're not lazy, instead of taking these offers:

• Open a free bitstamp.net account
• Go to Deposit->Ripple and follow instructions or select the "Send using Ripple web client" button.
• In the Ripple client on the send page fill out the form to send a small amount of BTC (say 0.01) to Bitstamp
• Notice that one of the payment options is to use your XRP
• Note the exchange-rate/price is way better^*
• Increase the amount of BTC to send until you're sending as much of your XRP as you care to (if you increase the amount too much the client will be unable to give you a payment option, obviously)
• Select "Send XRP" to make the exchange and tranfer
• Go back to bitstamp.net, go to their Withdraw BTC page
• Enter in any bitcoin address you control
• Enjoy your bitcoin at a better rate^*

^* Currently ~49500 XRP per BTC, instead of the 200,000 XRP per BTC offered here. That means for each (say) 5000 XRP you send/sell you'll get ~0.101 BTC instead of 0.025 BTC.

Real tl;dr: "I'm a whiny bastard that feels entiled to more free stuff than the already generous amount of free stuff that I was given for doing almost nothing."

Shut up and take your free handout. Some of us didn't get any and actually paid for our starting XRP.

Works great for me  (minus the occasional disconnect or the occasional failure to update the order book).

It's not. The wiki was just using the name MtGox as an example.


You mean "the spreads on Ripple" ... Bitstamp.net isn't too bad (still a lot less volume than MtGox). Other than trading for XRP the volumes on Ripple are very low right now. It's still in beta after all. It is trivial however to whip your Ripple Bitstamp-BTC over to Bitstamp, sell it there, and whip the resultant USD back into Ripple as Bitstamp-USD (and offer it there for a profit or trade it for XRP or use it in a payment, etc).

As a public service announcement for others reading this ...

If you're not lazy, instead of taking the OP's offer:

• Open a free bitstamp.net account
• Go to Deposit->Ripple and follow instructions or select the "Send using Ripple web client" button.
• In the Ripple client on the send page fill out the form to send a small amount of BTC (say 0.01) to Bitstamp
• Notice that one of the payment options is to use your XRP
• Note the exchange-rate/price is way better^*
• Increase the amount of BTC to send until you're sending as much of your XRP as you care to (if you increase the amount too much the client will be unable to give you a payment option, obviously)
• Select "Send XRP" to make the exchange and tranfer
• Go back to bitstamp.net, go to their Withdraw BTC page
• Enter in any bitcoin address you control
• Enjoy your bitcoin at a better rate^*

^* Currently ~49500 XRP per BTC, so for the 19,800 XRP the OP mentions you'd get ~0.4 BTC instead of the 0.264 being offered here.

Yes, trivially via Bitstamp.net

Check the Ripple order books to see which has the best prices.

Seach for one of the half dozen posts here or the dozen or so at ripple.com/forum that detail how to do it.


And ignore the people trying to trade XRP outside of Ripple. Almost without fail they're charging 3 to 55 times (in this case) the going rate inside Ripple.

I just want to point out here how easy this is (people seem to be taking crap offers for their XRP because maybe they think it's hard or expensive to get bitcoin out of Ripple?).
Both WeExchange and Bitstamp allow for a quick and easy account signup only requiring a valid e-mail address (for unverified accounts). Both charge no fee for the Ripple to gateway "deposit" (as they call in on their websites) (as Joel says, the fee is zero only if you use the gateway matching the BTC you hold in ripple, otherwise there is ~0.7% fee to switch them) and both send the bitcoin to any bitcoin address without any fee. WeExchange does however require a minimum send of 0.1 BTC (don't know about Bitstamp).

As with all the offers to buy XRP I've seen on the forum that's a horrible price. In this case about 1/5th of the rate available at the in-Ripple exchange. It's easy to trade XRP for Bitstamp-BTC in Ripple and then have Bitstamp send you actual bitcoin.

[edit:]Oh, and by the way you can trade your XRP without even using the trading interface if you're lazy. Just go to your (free) WeExchange or Bitstamp account and follow their "deposit ripple" instructions. The instructions will get you to use the ripple client to send BTC to their ripple address; enter in a small amount of BTC to send; notice you're given the option of doing it with your XRP (using the best available price). Just increase the BTC amount until you get about the XRP you want to "sell" and send it to your gateway account.

[edit: I didn't see Joel's response when I wrote this, (stupid forum putting it on the next page) so I repeat much of what he said; oh well I'll leave it here anyway]


Depends on what you want to do with the account. Details are available at the Ripple wiki.

• You need 200 XRP in reserve to hold the account.
• You need 50 XRP in reserve for each trust line
• You need 50 XRP in reserve for each open trade offer
• You need 0.000010 XRP for each transaction (action that changes the ledger) (can be dynamically raised by the servers as an anti-spam measure)

The reserves do not come out of your XRP balance, they are just part of your balance you are not allowed to use for anything other than transaction costs.
The two 50 XRP reserves become un-reserved and usable again if you clear the trust line (set the trust to zero) or if the order is canceled of filled. Currently you can't destroy/delete your account so the 200 XRP account reserve can't be unreserved; although theoretically, if you did enough transactions (many millions), you could use up all your reserves and have 0 XRP.

So with, for example, just 450.1 XRP you can have a mix of five trust lines and open/outstanding trade offers. If you're mostly going to use a single gateway this might be sufficient. On the other hand my current required reserves are closer to 3000 (I have a higher than average number of trust lines to friends and a higher than average number of outstanding offers). The 0.1 extra in my 450.1 example lets you do 10000 transactions without going into your reserves. A transaction is anything that changes the ledger and includes:

• Adding, removing, or changing a trust line
• Adding or canceling a trade offer
• Sending a payment

The transaction fees are destroyed. The top of the Ripple Live Graph says "total ripples: 99,999,999,999.23055". There was an initial 100 billion XRP so 0.769450 XRP has been destroyed so far.


You can send Ripples to any other Ripple user without needing a trusted path or gateway. For this reason some people may ask for payments in XRP.
Since Ripple supports any number of currencies it can be difficult with trade offers for someone to provide currency arbitrage between many currencies, they can use trades to/from XRP for each currency to facilitate arbitrage across many currencies; this would require extra XRP be available in their account to cover the trades.
Occasionally a very good trade price for something comes up (just today the BTC/XRP was nice and low and lagged the rebounding BTC/USD prices at exchanges) and having spare XRP hanging around means you can take advantage of such offers without liquidating other currencies you may be holding.

Cool! 
Trying to send to your own address used to just spin and never find a path, great that this is fixed as it can be very useful. Note that it works for any currency (other than XRP) that you trust someone for.
You can't seem to use it to transfer a currency from one issuer to another however, you still need trades or a second account to do that I guess.

Paraphrasing an old joke: easy, fast, cheap; pick two.

Bitstamp doesn't support CAD at all and if your goal is to get funds into your Bitstamp account you don't need Ripple to do it (unless you're trying to leverage your Ripple credit lines).

Assuming what you really want is to get CAD into Ripple then as Joel says there are two gateways that support CAD directly. But you may not want/need to do that at all depending on what you want to do.

WeExchange supports CAD and does bank transfers, but you should check out the Ripple Live Graph for the WeExchange CAD first (set the currency to Other then type CAD and explore the reach by clicking the nodes with thin circles around them), only two people hold any at all totalling only ~$170 and only four others trust WeExchange-CAD for anything over 1 CAD (thus the people that you could currently pay with WeExchange CAD is limited) (compare that with the $74816 of Bitstamp-USD that people currently hold in Ripple). There also isn't much/any trading of WeExchange-CAD for other currencies (even on WeEx itself!) so you're kinda stuck with it. This may improve when Ripple gets out of beta.

RippleUnion supports CAD but only (as far as I know, check the website as they keep adding things) supports adding funds to Ripple from the old/classic Ripplepay system. However, RippleUnion has some interesting options for getting money out of Ripple. Also note that (at least for now) RippleUnion charges no transit fess. WeExchange charges 0.5% everytime their funds change hands and Bitstamp charges 0.2% (similar to how the exchanges charge (larger) fees for every trade).

As Joel says Bitstamp doesn't support CAD, but if you can send them USD or bitcoin there is a market within Ripple to exchange that for RippleUnion-CAD. See the Ripple client's order book for CAD/USD (or USD/CAD if you prefer) with the issuers set to RippleUnion-CAD and Bitstamp-USD (click "change issuer" and paste the Ripple addresses or add them to your contact list to use the names).


Do you really need/want to put your CAD bank funds into Ripple at this time? (Bitcoin is different since you can trivially get it in and out of Ripple via both WeEx and Bitstamp). What would you do right now with CAD in Ripple? Since Ripple is only in Beta there are currently no merchants (other than RippleUnion's proxy) that accept Ripple payments. If you want to use it to send funds to friends then you can arrange trust/credit lines between your friends to do so without any bank transfers at all (except possibly to settle debts later if the need arises). If you want to be able send funds to strangers on the internet (e.g. to buy/sell something ala bitcoin-otc) then you may still be able to do so just by getting a trust/credit line to someone that has a credit path to a gateway. If you want to be a merchent and sell things then of course you instead need to look at how the gateways can send you bitcoin or bank funds.

Personally I think the easiest way to get started and get some "value"/funds into Ripple right now is either with bitcoin (by far the easiest at the moment) or to have a friend/aquaintence that has a credit path to the gateway(s) you're interested in extend you credit. If they won't trust you with credit you could always pay them (in person with cash, with Paypal, whatever) and in return they'd send you matching funds in Ripple (just make sure you're aware of what you can and can't do with the resulting IOU; either make sure you get an IOU from a gateway you trust or that you trust the person and they have a path to a gateway you want to use or the people you want to pay). From a quick scan of your forum profile it looks like you're comfortable doing some otc style trades so you could always ask to trade for any of RippleUnion-CAD, Bitstamp-USD, Bitstamp-BTC, or XRP (you'd agree to send them some kind of payment outside of Ripple and they'd send the agreed amount by paying you from within Ripple).

I'm saying the client could present it exactly that way, and would use contracts behind the scenes to accomplish it. The client can't do what you want without either contracts or requiring changes to the server specific to this one feature. The smart thing is to hold off on this feature until contracts are available and not to hack it in.

[Disclaimer, I have no relationship to OpenCoin or the developers so I have no idea on how/if/when they're planing any contract support or how it would look in the client.]

In the future you'd likely be able to use Ripple contracts. (note, the details on that wiki page would be hidden behind a user friendly interface in the client).  Keep in mind that Ripple is in Beta; it's not complete.

In the mean-time you could find a trusted third party to act as escrow/intermediatary or just both use 'send'. This is very much like how current bitcoin-otc trading works.

There might be a clever way to kludge the existing trading system to do what you ask, but it's non-obvious how to do it (at least to me).

On re-reading your question and my answer I think calling things "IOUs" may be confusing in this case. All Ripple does is track balances just like your bank accounts. The whole second part of your question is probably best understood just by thinking of account balances as with any other accounts you may be more familiar with (bank balances, credit card balances, gift card balances, etc).

A positive balance means someone owes you something (with a bank account it's the bank; with Ripple it's a friend or a gateway). A negative balance means you owe someone something (with your bank it'd be a mortgage or bank loan; in Ripple it'd be a friend, Bitstamp and WeExchange don't extend credit so you can never have a negate balance with them).

The total balance shown in Ripple is just the sum of all the amounts on each trust line (per currency). You can see them individually on the "Advanced->Trust" page.

You follow the instructions on the Bitstamp deposit->ripple page. If you don't care about the details that is all you need to do/know. The rest is implementation details just because you asked, again I stress that users don't need to know the details.

The address they give will include a destination tag like so: ?dt=12345. This is what lets Bitstamp know what gateway account the payment is for. You either use the provided button that links to the Ripple client, copy+paste the address as is, or adjust your Bitstamp contact to include the destination tag (to make it easier for yourself in the future). If a user screws up and tries to send a payment without a destination tag, Ripple will refuse it (the Bitstamp account has set a special flag to always require destination tags). If a user screws up and uses a tag that matches someone else's account then they're screwed (same as if you used the wrong destination bank account on a wire transfer).

You just make a payment to the Bitstamp address (with the correct destination tag for your Bitstamp account) and it all works. If you have Bitstamp IOUs they will (usually) be used. But *any* path will work as with any other payment/send in Ripple.

For example, if you ask to send a very small amount of BTC to Bitstamp you'll notice you're given the option to use XRP (assuming you have some extra). That option is added using the current best BTC/XRP trade offers. Similarly if you had no Bitstamp-BTC IOUs but instead had dchapes-BTC IOUs from me you could still "cash-out" at Bitstamp by making a payment and Ripple would do the payment through me. That's because I'm holding Bitstamp-BTC that you can access via my IOUs (or a line of credit). Your balance (of my IOUs) goes down; my balance stays the same (I have fewer outstanding IOUs to you and fewer IOUs from Bitstamp); and Bitstamp's balance goes up (and they record it as a deposit to your account due to the destination tag).

As a detail, I said "(usually)" above. If someone entered a trade offer accepting 0.97*X of your USD IOUs for X of Bitstamp-USD IOUs then Ripple would notice that's better for you and automatically use it. You'd see a suprising option on the "send" page saying to pay Bitstamp 10 USD you can send just 9.70 USD! Your balance goes done by $9.70; the other generous person has their balance go down by $0.30 as they swap IOUs; and Bitstamp's balance goes up by $10 USD. Why would anyone make such an offer? Perhaps they're your next door neighbour and they know you'll redeem their USD IOU at face value for no fee (e.g. they Ripple you 20 USD and you hand them a twenty dollar bill) where-as to bank wire transfer the funds to themselves through Bitstamp costs bank fees and is prohibitively expensive for small amounts. E.g. they're paying you ~3% instead of whatever Bitstamp+banks charge.

Normally that's the kind of thing a gateway does but if you wanted it to act like a gift certificate that's exactly what you could do.

That effectively makes you a gateway. If you just wanted to use it like a gift certificate you'd only redeem it for merchandise and not for cash. (Although perhaps you'd give them cash change for a purchase; some retailers may also do this for small amounts instead of leaving pennies on a gift card).

They IOUs are not worthless. Once the payment occurs in Ripple, everyone's balances are updated. Either IOUs get destroyed (like when you pay Bitstamp to redeem them) or they get transferred around or even created.

As for you not honouring your part of the transaction, that operates just like any real life transaction. With a cash for product transaction if they hand you $20 or let you charge their debt/credit card and you then refuse to let them take the product out of your store they'll get upset. Similarly if they hold up the $20 and you bag the product and hand it to them and they then run out of your store still holding on to their $20 you'd be upset.

Fees do indeed suck, but you do not pay any fee into or out of Ripple with the existing gateways.
The gateways charge banking related fees on fiat to and from your gateway account (same as most/all exchanges) but no fee to/from Ripple from there; both Bitstamp and WeExchange pay BTC transaction fees when withdrawing raw/actual BTC (hence WeExchange's minimum 0.1BTC bitcoin withdrawal).

Gateways can charge a transfer fee on their IOUs.
Bitstamp charges 0.2% as seen on their withdraw to Ripple page. (Note, at least it's cheaper than their 0.5% fee on their exchange).

That's one of the reasons why trust lines among friends can be useful, no fees.
One of the developers has repeatedly mentioned he'd like to see a virtual gateway arise that takes Bitstamp or WeExchange IOUs and gives you their own at lower or zero fees. That, plus competition between gateways should help to drive down transfer fees.

If you're talking about path finding that only comes into play with the "send"/"pay" interface and not (currently) with the trade interface. To experiment, try sending 0.0001 DYM to TTBit (the issuer); just don't actually hit "SEND" and nothing will happen but you can see the possibilities that Ripple found; it will likely include XRP and probably BTC (if you hold any). Sadly the send page used to include the effective exchange rate but they removed that.

The developers mentioned adding synthetic trades to the order book so that some of this could be done via the trading interface but it hasn't happened yet (E.g. if so that you'd see a synthetic DYM/BTC offer based on any DYM/XRP and BTC/XRP offers and if you entered a matching offer it would actually do the other two trades for you).

I recommend you read Ripple, or Bills of Exchange 2.0. It might enlighten you on why an automated way of handing IOUs and making them usable/tradable/divisable without the issuer's intervention is not a step a backwards but instead cuts out a lot of what banks do for large fees.