You can compare the rates and volumes of the various exchanges that trade XRP at http://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ripple/#markets

Note that trade volumes within Ripple's internal distributed exchange dwarf that on the external exchanges while giving better prices. To see how internal trade volume is segregated, visit www.ripplecharts.com for an overview / per currency breakdown and www.ripplecharts.com/#/markets to examine individual order books and trade histories.

Note: ripple charts might be a little slow right now. Western Union just announced that they are engaged in a ripple pilot, and that has caused a surge of traffic to the charting site.

To find out more about individual gateways, visit www.coinist.co

The gateways with the highest XRP/BTC volumes will be Bitstamp and SnapSwap (SnapSwap is listed as btc2ripple in many places). SnapSwap-btc2ripple is what you receive if you use the inbound Bitcoin bridge from within the www.rippletrade.com client (under Fund->BTC menus/tabs).

One nice thing about bringing BTC into Ripple through the inbound bridge in RippleTrade is that it will auto convert a few cents worth of BTC into the XRP needed for your account reserve if your account has not already been activated.

Will the in-game credits also be integrated with the Ripple ledger? It would be cool to have the in-game credits freely tradable with any other crypto, fiat, bullion or asset within Ripple's decentralized exchange.

While Ripple has been around since 2004, the implementation that we are discussing, which has an internal cryptocurrency and transactions that are confirmed and applied to a shared ledger via a decentralized cryptographic consensus process, has only been around since December 2012.

If you frequent coin market cap and sort on volume, you will see that it is usually in the top three cryptos by volume.


Ripple uses a globally shared ledger, which is based on a radix-16 Merkle tree. Ripple's ledger is a different type of structure from the blockchain, but they are both secured with cryptography (Think of how both gasoline powered cars and diesel powered cars are both still automobiles, even though the engine designs are different, or how propeller planes and helicoptors are both aircraft, if you want an example with more divergence in technology).

With Ripple, each account has a public address and a private secret, which is used to sign transactions cryptographically. The validators use cryptography to ensure that only properly signed transactions are applied to the ledger. Since cryptographic mechanisms and data structures are at the heart of Ripple, it is a cryptocurrency.


The source is completely open under one of the most permissive licenses around (the ISC license). This applies to the source for everything you need to fork a complete ecosystem (libraries, web client, wallet vault, etc) in addition to the core server, rippled.

The collection of repositories is found at https://github.com/ripple and the core server itself is at https://github.com/ripple/rippled

The Ripple source is open enough that the project has already been forked multiple times (by Stellar and some projects in China).

If you want to learn more about how Ripple works, the best place to start is with the white papers:

https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?t=4301

Start with the primer and then either move to the Gateway paper or the Consensus paper depending on whether you are more interested in how people interact with the system or the algorithm underpinning consensus.

If this is legit, please post something on the actual exchange's website or provide a link to the ripple.txt file on the exchange website that verifies the issuing address.

Right now, I see a brand new forum member and no mention of this on the clevercoin site, and it looks very fishy.

That main problem with this assertion is that Stellar has modified the Ripple consensus mechanism, so the two systems are no longer equivalent.

fintechophile examined the stellar consensus modifications and found that when he fed identical inputs into the code, that the stellar consensus implementation produces different results than the ripple implementation.

Read his analysis.

I do not understand the consensus code well enough to explain based on the code itself, but I will direct your attention to the Stellar code commit that made the change and let it speak for itself:

https://github.com/stellar/stellard/commit/067d7158720331937fc782cbb230e8d422cd7341

The title of the commit is as follows:


The title and location of the change indicate that stellard is no longer using the same consensus algorithm as rippled.

Now, examine the actual commit comment:


When David Schwartz described why the Ripple algorithm would not fork, it was because nodes that found themselves in the minority would wait to rejoin the consensus before advancing.

However, the plain English reading of this stellar commit comment implies that this behavior was discarded and that in the Stellar consensus algorithm, nodes plow forward blindly instead of actually waiting to reach consensus with the rest of the network. This sounds like a recipe for a fork.

Regardless, it appears that the two systems are no longer using the same consensus algorithm.

The Ripple Labs response is here:
https://ripple.com/why-the-stellar-forking-issue-does-not-affect-ripple/

Indeed. Since Ripple is currency agnostic and already supports bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies, each integration Ripple makes into the existing financial system is a win for every other crypto that has a Ripple gateway. Why settle for crypto exchanges that are both centralized and limit your counter-currency choices when the entire world of Ripple liquidity is open to you?

You will want to migrate your wallet to rippletrade.com. The client that you listed above has been deprecated and will no longer work after December 15.

Announcement here:
https://forum.ripple.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=8526

This is a standard feature of the Ripple client at rippletrade.com -- It dynamically calculates the total Ripple portfolio value in terms of any asset that you hold and also displays a nice circular chart showing the proportion of total portfolio value derived from each asset.

You could save yourself a lot of trouble and instantly take advantage of a large number of assets by using Ripple as the back end of your exchange. Use gatewayd (intro video) as the gateway infrastructure to link the game's servers into Ripple's decentralized exchange and your users can trade IRI against any of the other assets currently traded on Ripple.

Your game client code could present a curated selection of trade pairs within the game, but users would also have the option to trade against the full range of cryptos, fiat and physical vaulted bullion using the Ripple client of their choice. This will give IRI better liquidity than if it is only traded by players within the game.

Long before you go live, offer autobridging will be deployed, so IRI should enjoy liquidity to all manner of assets without additional effort on your part. Think about it.

If Litecoin holders were trading inside of Ripple instead of on centralized exchanges, they would gain the ability to make purchases with their Litecoin at any merchant that accepts Visa (web or brick and mortar stores). There are roughly five Ripple debit card initiatives and the best of them convert your chosen assets at the instant of purchase, so you can trade and hold at your leisure, but spend instantly as well (Shift Payments, SmartyCash, xapo, eSpend and tide payments).

Don't look at Hashcoin's CC integration with envy. Keep your value in Litecoin, but reap the benefits of Ripple's ability to federate payment systems.

In order to lose their funds, it was necessary for Justcoin to suffer multiple failures. If even one of the following practices had been in effect, this theft would either not have happened or been limited to a reasonably small percentage of funds:

• Justcoin failed to properly implement code to process deposits setting the tfPartialPayment flag, which was already documented on the Ripple wiki before Justcoin existed. The payment transaction type only supports three flags. Even if the documentation did not include a screaming warning, one would think a gateway developer would test the limited payment flag options to see what happens. The Justcoin deposit code could have also succeeded by using or double checking against the transaction metadata containing the before and after balances.
• Justcoin failed to only keep a small portion of the exchange's funds in their hot wallet. In a June interview, Justcoin described how over 90% of funds were in cold storage, yet they are freezing 23.27% percent of XRP deposits. That's a 13.27% discrepancy.
• Justcoin failed to ensure that the balance of user deposits credited in their exchange's database matched the funds actually held in their Ripple and Stellar accounts. The nice thing about open ledgers is that you can query them to perform an instant audit and reconciliation with your exchange's database. Disabling deposits when the two values are in disagreement prevents these kinds of problems.
• Justcoin failed to either impose withdrawal limits on accounts or to flag unusually large transactions for manual approval. Mitch Ratcliffe once said, “Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns.” There is a place for manual review of extreme withdrawals, and it can be done in a way that does not impose much delay.

Other gateways, and Ripple has well over two dozen now, said that someone attempted to hack them the same way that Justcoin was hacked, however they lost no funds because they they implemented stronger controls.

Thanks for the transparency. Kraken always struck me as the sort of well run exchange that has good internal controls, like an appropriately small hot wallet and manual review of certain transaction profiles, so I'm sure that you would have caught any attempt fairly quickly.

During the discussion of the episode over on the Stellar forum, the bx.in.th exchange operator described one of their controls, which makes exceptionally good sense:


If Kraken isn't already doing something similar (and you very well may be), it might be worth implementing as an extra safeguard for all assets.

   

If Kraken finds that it properly implemented the code to receive payments, and was not vulnerable, I hope that you will say so. This is much preferable to bringing Ripple and Stellar back online and not saying whether Kraken was safe to begin with or was fixed during the review.

Both Coinex and RippleFox have stated that they had properly accounted for partial payments in their deposit code, and were not at risk (RippleFox said that they were actually attacked, but their deposit code correctly examined the amount received, so their gateway implementation credited the attackers account with the funds actually received).

I have no idea who actually decided the pairings -- the announcement was a complete surprise to me.

However, based on a few news articles and a response from BitJohn, it looks like this is the first step of a staged roll out for Cryptsy and that they are planning to become a full Ripple gateway. If this is true, it makes sense that they support so many trading pairs against XRP, because Cryptsy could eventually issue balances for each of those coins within Ripple itself.   

That is the point where it gets really interesting because Ripple's decentralized exchange and pathfinding will let Cryptsy users either trade their Cryptsy balances against any other liquid asset in the Ripple network (via auto bridging), pay with their altcoin anywhere bitcoin is accepted (via the bitcoin bridge) or pay with their altcoin anywhere Visa is accepted (via a Shift Payments card).

It is also possible that Cryptsy is setting up XRP crosses with most of the coins on their existing trading platform and waiting to see which ones develop volume. Then, when they start issuing balances on Ripple, they could only support the ones that already have volume. That is sheer speculation, but it makes sense from a support perspective.

This is pretty huge! Will Cryptsy also be issuing asset balances within Ripple itself, so that they can used within the Ripple system?

Cryptsy can still get its cut via transfer fees on the Ripple balances it issues. However, letting markets develop for Cryptsy balances within Ripple has several advantages for the users, and makes Cryptsy's offering more attractive:

• Users could trade against any asset in Ripple, such as  vaulted gold or Euros. The imminent release of offer autobridging will make this even more useful.
• Users could instantly spend their Cryptsy altcoin balances wherever bitcoin is accepted, via Ripple's automated pathfinding and bitcoin bridge.
• Users could take advantage of any other outbound bridges to move their Cryptsy balances into their desired form. For example, Canadian and European users can send Ripple balances directly into their bank accounts via either Ripple Union's CAD direct deposit bridge or sepa.link's EUR (SEPA) bridge.

Cryptsy is already a huge cryptocurrency marketplace, but providing access to such features could help lure those people who are currently trading elsewhere.

Cryptsy just added XRP as their third market, with 132 pairs.

https://twitter.com/cryptsy/status/519544318051500032

You did not read that page closely. XRP cannot be frozen, only IOUs from gateways that have not explicitly disclaimed the ability to freeze individual accounts.

XRP is always safe from freezing, but if you are worried about having your gateway issued assets frozen, you can also choose to only accept IOUs from gateways that have permanently and irrevocably renounced the ability to freeze individual holders of their IOUs.

Do you have a libertarian viewpoint?

Do you believe in choice and free markets?

Then you should have no problems in allowing gateways the ability to either choose to allow freezing of individual trust lines or to disclaim that ability so that they cannot do so.

This empowers the users to choose the gateways that serve their needs, and the added abilities allow gateways to serve the ripple ecosystem who would be unable to do so otherwise.

In either case, XRP cannot be frozen, only gateway assets and only if the user chooses to hold then. Several gateways have already permanently disclaimed the ability to freeze the assets that they issue. People have choice - The market will decide.

No, that is not true. XRP is a crypto currency, and you need an account's secret crypto key to do anything with the XRP held by that account. The validator network validates the cryptographic signatures on transactions and only accepts those that are properly signed with the correct keys.

The UNL is not unique to the entire Ripple network. Each validator gets to choose which other nodes are placed in its own UNL. That is, each node operator chooses who to trust.

The "unique" terminology comes from the idea that the validators that you place in your UNL should be unique entities, so that you don't fill it up with nodes controlled by a single agent who might have his nodes collude against you.

It is fine that you don't trust the nodes in your UNL as long as you trust that they won't collude against you. You might not trust either the Road Runner or Wile E Coyote, but you can trust that they won't collude against you, so it would be OK to add both.

See thethe Ripple Consensus white paper for a more formal description:

https://ripple.com/files/ripple_consensus_whitepaper.pdf

That is demonstrably false. Stop making up numbers.

Spend a little time on coinmarketcap, and you will see that Ripple's daily trade volume is usually several hundred thousand USD. There was an exception last week where there was a day or two with trade volume around 1.3 million USD.

Sort all listed coins by volume, and you will find that Ripple is almost always in the top 10 and often in the top 5.

If you check in on Ripple Charts as well, you will see that the transaction volume is usually several million per day.

With more large firms coming to Ripple, and bringing their customers enmass, this will only grow.