Cypherdoc: Great to meet you! What did you think of the conference?
i thought it was great and your meetup was the perfect kickoff. really enjoyed meeting you, Andreas, and Stephanie. you're all great ppl and are contributing to Bitcoin in a super way. |
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I think the PR work OpenCoin is doing is really good, because they are appealing to people's dislike of MtGox's status and naivities of "decentralized exchanges". The main narrative is "we are not here to threaten you, we only want to help Bitcoin". It's clever, really.
The truth about the decentralized exchanges is that while Ripple performs a slick unified interface, the exchanges themselves are still just that, centralized market places, subject to theft, legal issues, etc.
you're absolutely right about them trying to steal Bitcoiners. that's why they're here on this forum and had a booth at conference. |
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Saw this guy in first class on the way home. Anyone know the old geezer? He looks like he had an eventful weekend, too. Must have been partying at the convention next door to ours.  no, i think i saw him in the mining session.  |
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i simply asked misterbigg why a bank or financial institution would voluntarily participate as a gateway in the Ripple system when they have the Fed as an enabler? why would they submit to OpenCoin?
anything less than a bank as a gateway will be considered a money transmitter and have to comply with FinCen regs.
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he's busy deleting posts of mine as well. he's a scumbag Ripple shill.
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It's a really good business model, and they are making many people jealous for not being the first to come up with this idea  You should instead be happy for them and waiting for the completion of this new toy that they are making and giving to the community! I fully agree. Another pain point is that people who mine for Bitcoin are likely upset that Ripple's built in currency claims to have more utility than Bitcoin but require no mining, making the miners obsolete. mining is half the fun, and its why bitcoin was/is a hit...the novelty of it for geeks, and those who got paid mostly deserved it. yes, unless these guys mine they'll never understand what drives us miners. it's empowering for the individual. |
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you all know that if you opened the source, there will not be much validators who joins your network, but there will lots of alternative Ripple-XRP system show up, and the ones who distribute the XRP in a predictable and fairly way will win the competition, and at the last, the 100% pre-mined XRP will has no value. As a validator, I would prefer OpenCoin have a way to make money and pay lots of developers' salaries instead of the Bitcoin open source model where no company is able to profit directly and they have to go around begging for donations to pay Gavin. this is just a sleezy way to describe the situation and represents a true lack of understanding of what open source represents. as if Bitcoin is having a problem with developers. pffft. we just needed to voluntarily fund Gavin's position. the community has done just that; with no problem. now, even Garzik has found full employment with BitPay. Bitcoin is doing fantastic with it's open source model and this weekend's Conference showed just that. |
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ummm, don't mean to be a skeptic but how can this be possible given that they've been shutting down exchanges bank accounts recently?
They (FINTRAC) didn't shutdown any exchange bank account. The bank did it all by themselves. you're right. so does this mean those banks will be required to reinstate the accounts? and will we thus see the return of those exchanges? which were shut down again? Cavirtex? Virtex has had several accounts frozen but they are still operating and hold an open account with the Bank of Montreal I believe. I have an account with Virtex that I have never had trouble accessing or sending money to. even now? |
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ummm, don't mean to be a skeptic but how can this be possible given that they've been shutting down exchanges bank accounts recently?
They (FINTRAC) didn't shutdown any exchange bank account. The bank did it all by themselves. you're right. so does this mean those banks will be required to reinstate the accounts? and will we thus see the return of those exchanges? which were shut down again? Cavirtex? |
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ummm, don't mean to be a skeptic but how can this be possible given that they've been shutting down exchanges bank accounts recently?
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Dan - He gives 0% change the proof of work will remain unchanged, prediction: will not survive the year. Not sure what the coming proof of work fuctions will look like. Shared mining (whats that called). Life or death of BTC on mining being truly distributed. Must changed. He is being very emphatic on this.
Very interesting... Would like to know more about this! I also. It was a somewhat jaw-dropping statement and one of the most interesting things I saw at the conference. I cannot imagine such a change of this magnitude in this timeframe on the basis of a theoretical weakness (i.e., non-exploited semi-monopolization of hashing hardware.) I can think of a number of hypothesis, but won't outline them until I can find the most appropriate thread (stumbled here via a Google search.) My best case scenario is that Kaminiski simply felt that nobody in core dev has put the appropriate effort into conceptualizing how such a shift might be engineered (were it necessary) and was hoping to light a fire under their asses. no it wasn't. Kaminsky's been wrong before and he'll be wrong again. his argument was based on the same one when Deepbit got close to 50% (or perhaps even over). somehow the pools are incentivized to attack Bitcoin is what he thinks. this has been proven wrong. pools are invested in Bitcoin. if they attack the source of their own income they would destroy themselves. plus the fact that a pool is composed of individual miners who collectively want Bitcoin to survive and would defect the moment they realize their pool is conducting such an attack. Eleuthria is a good example of a self aware pool operator who voluntarily prevents his pool from getting too close to 50%. he doesn't even want to go near there b/c he doesn't want all the hysterical skeptics to tout an attack he realizes is impractical. |
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Thanks for doing this! I don't really like all this talk of taint...  the ideal currency should be 100% neutral/perfectly fungible i agree. and so does Alan Reiner. |
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why would a validator validate if they're not getting paid? Joel says altruism. i say no, Ripple won't be able to depend on that. this is why Bitcoin pays miners, which is essentially validating. 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. if gateways then act as validators then how can they hide behind Tor? Mr. B said that gateways would have to be banks or an institution that runs KYC and has valid licensing. Some gateways will probably act as vaildators. Not every validator has to. or it just fails, Joel. |
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I think more so that you can't release the code because others would simply fork it and make your code now worth less than before. Call it a form of dilution. You folks as a business have a vested interest as well as your investors not to open the source code. This doesn't sound unreasonable. Let's pretend that its true - OpenCoin is waiting until enough assets are in the current ledger chain to where any fork will not have enough gateway support to be viable. So what? Is it wrong that OpenCoin wants to profit from their work? wow, if that's your justification for what's supposedly a healthy fair system, that's a big problem essentially you're condoning a closed source system that "traps" enough participants and their money into it to the point there is no turning back. we have one of those already in what's called the Federal Reserve System. |
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b/c you have no real functioning network?
The Ripple network already functions, even though it is small and in beta and hawaladars can already make use of it if they want to. Once the code is released they can run additional validators if they want to, and probably as Tor hidden services if necessary. why would a validator validate if they're not getting paid? Joel says altruism. i say no, Ripple won't be able to depend on that. this is why Bitcoin pays miners, which is essentially validating. if gateways then act as validators then how can they hide behind Tor? Mr. B said that gateways would have to be banks or an institution that runs KYC and has valid licensing. |
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as i suspected, you're just guessing.
No, not just guessing, I just gave you a rational argument. I didn't claim it was a certainty though, hence "seems" and "pretty likely", not "certainly". Do you disagree it is likely? If so, what makes you say so? b/c you have no real functioning network? |
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please provide a factual argument why you make this assertion.
It is based on the same principle of making use of a trust graph and could benefit from the added reliability and security of a P2P cryptographic accounting system like Ripple. Hawala already makes use of the banking system. as i suspected, you're just guessing. |
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It seems pretty likely the Hawala network will try to make use of the Ripple network.
please provide a factual argument why you make this assertion. |
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Mrbigg: what do you plan to do with your Ripples? I would like to hold them for as long as possible, only liquidating them a little bit at a time to pay for expenses. Ideally a gateway will offer some sort of checking account where I can deposit my XRP and spend them using regular checks, a debit card, and ACH payments the way I spend my dollars now. I'd also like this for my Bitcoins - I want to hold all my savings in cryptocurrencies only, converting them into US Dollars milliseconds before I spend it at traditional places like the gas station, grocery store, or rent. This is what Ripple promises to do eventually. my argument is that their only way to make a killing (10x-100x) which their investors demand is to create a system that naturally causes XRP to rise in value. there is huge potential to create economic distortions using this model. XRPs will rise in value because they do useful things in the Ripple system. I don't see how providing utility leads to economic distortions. Bitcoin has huge potential to create economic distortions - of the good kind! Mr. B, didn't you say gateways needed to be banks in order to provide KYC, licenses, and liquidity? what possible motivation would banks have to participate? what economic pressure can Ripple possibly exert at this stage to make that happen? i say zero and that they won't. i think that OpenCoin realizes this too as i now hear they are letting any 'ol yahoo become a gateway now out of what seems like desperation to get bootstrapped. this will fail miserably as inevitably these types of small gateways will fail or become scams. the critical thing to realize is that any system, including Bitcoin, cannot afford to stumble. fortunately, the devs and miners saw this critical fact when we had the hard fork from 0.7 to 0.8 and they scrambled to prevent anyone from losing a penny. under Ripple, i keep hearing you guys say that if trust is betrayed by a gateway, its ok, they will no longer be trusted. but i say, at what cost? all it will take is for a couple, if not one, gateway to fail and lose alot of ppl money for the system to implode. and when you're dealing with a bunch of IOU's w/o a central bank to bail out bad debt (IOU's) you are looking at a system primed to fail. |
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Knowing this, anyone who claims that OpenCoin plans to dump XRP without opening the source code is not arguing in good faith.
i'm not arguing that. i think the dump will come after they open source the code. that still doesn't change any of my arguments. my argument is that their only way to make a killing (10x-100x) which their investors demand is to create a system that naturally causes XRP to rise in value. there is huge potential to create economic distortions using this model. |
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