I too am impressed with Ripples. I trade digital goods with people in the US and using Bitcoins is a nightmare for the below reasons.


1. Not everyone trusts online wallets so they download the client -  This problem could be solved if they used Electrum
2. Confirmations sometimes take 40 minutes - This could be solved if we both had Gox accounts and done Bitcoin to Bitcoin withdrawal


My typical Paypal trade is below:

1. I send £ to Payal - This is through online banking transfer and is quicker than Bitcoins but slower than Ripples
2. I send the payment as a personal payment to the US. It costs $2.50  and a 3% fee to convert £ to $

The person trusts me otherwise this trade wouldn't be possible due to charge backs.

If 2 people who already had Bitcoins were to attempt the above trade it would work fine. To be honest Litcoins would be even better.
The problem is how to get the money from the bank to the other persons bank. I believe Ripple can achieve this better than all ALT coins. You can send Currency in the Ripple network with a small fee of 0.2%( Bitstamp)

Ripple labs is a for Profit organisation. They intend to keep 45% of all Ripples. It would be like someone introducing Bitcoins and keeping 9.45 Million Bitcoins. The question you have ask yourself  is:

How much money is spent on electricity and mining equipment for Bitcoins?
Is Bitcoins better the Litecoins?
Is Litcoins better than Ripples




This video below is why I'm going to try to push Ripples in favor of the others.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zX0O8BkKUhw


By the way Ripple isn't a currency and Bitcoins are more like Gold but unlike Gold the day will come when it has 0 value. Ripple may have 0 value as well but its gonna take something brilliant to knock it out while Litecoins are better than Bitcoins as we speak!




 

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• hash(100) results in a value of 200
• hash(400) results in a value of 200

This would mean there is a collision i.e   hash(100) = hash(400)

I think either the loop would terminate for some value of  C less than 2^256 or it would not terminate, meaning there was a collison in the sha256

I was wondering why bitcoin uses   Sha256(Sha256()) instead of sha256() . Is it because the hashing algorithm is not considered safe?


If I ran the below program on a computer with near infinite computing power what value of C would the loop terminate? 

y = "abc"
C = 0
y = sha256(y)
y = sha256(y)

do loop until y = sha256("abc")
   {
    y = sha256(y)
    C = C + 1
   }
   
Print c

Hello

I'll just like to say hello to everyone.