Announcing the completion of the Ripple introductory video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9KqSgRZYgg

This video illustrates the goals and functionality of Ripple. It can also be used with the "What is Bitcoin" video (http://www.weusecoins.com/).

Congratulations to Nitin on a job very well done, and many thanks to all contributors. Enjoy!

Just created a simple page on Bitcoin credit:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Credit

Improvements welcome!

https://ripplexchange.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=971

This is a donation pool to fund the development of gpg key authentication for Ripple servers. All work developed for this pool to be released under an open license, and to support Rain Droplet and optionally other implementations such as RippleSite. A ticket for this feature is available here (https://trac.raindroplet.info/ticket/4); further specifications available upon request.

Donations can be made via Pledgie. Other methods, such as Ripple or Bitcoin, are completely welcome. For details or feedback, please e-mail daniel@ripplexchange.com.

I pledge an initial $100.

https://ripplexchange.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=826

Ripple has grown over recent months, from an interesting concept with dormant projects into an actively developing ecosystem.

The Ripple Project (http://ripple-project.org/) aims to build a new form of money which derives from existing social relationships rather than from rigidly inefficient central banking systems. The project involves technological as well as economic, social, and other aspects.

After an initial burst of activity when Ryan Fugger founded the project in 2004, the fundamental ideas emerged and a prototype called Ripplepay opened. However, the project did not gain sufficient traction to bootstrap into a mainstream trend.

Now, though, a number of old and new participants have had a chance to review the available resources, and the situation has changed with troubled economies and more open-minded people discussing ways to improve their communities' financial infrastructure.

In this fluid environment, the Ripple ecosystem evolves. From the initial vision and prototype, there are now several different software implementations to choose from with different design goals and architectures. Supporting services now include credit server hosting, an online market, and other facilities. And the Ripple user community now sees more frequent and dynamic interaction.

The project wiki (http://ripple-project.org/) is a good place to start familiarizing oneself with the concept and surrounding resources. Currently most ongoing discussions take place in the Ripple users group (https://groups.google.com/group/rippleusers/). Meanwhile, new implementations include Multiswap (https://multiswap.net/), an innovative "circular multilateral barter" system; Shire Hours (https://www.shirehours.com/), where liberty activists trade silver and time; Rivulet (https://github.com/jplewicke/rivulet), with the goal of integrating open transactions into existing sites; and Rain Droplet (https://raindroplet.info/), focused on building community credit.

With well over a hundred members from all parts of the world, and many more people aware of its ongoing progress, the Ripple community is growing as it advances the state of the art. The idea is a highly adaptable one, and the community is now searching for the best ways forward through a mix of lively discussions and varied experiments. Avenues include methods to decentralize the system further for enhanced resilience, candidate markets and marketing strategies, and improvements to software modularity and interoperability.

You are welcome to get involved by sharing your thoughts and participating. Start at the project home (http://ripple-project.org/), and branch out from there!

Announcing the availability of Rain Droplet, an open decentralized community credit service:

https://raindroplet.info/

You can use this free and open site to share credit with your community. This was discussed recently with respect to Ripple, the technology on which Rain Droplet is based:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1923.0
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1937.0

While there are other Ripplized services, Rain Droplet includes a default Bitcoin denomination, and will continue to work on improvements that would serve this community and the public.

At this point Rain Droplet is still new, and has lots of room to grow. You may have to add a CA Cert certificate for your browser to recognize the site certificate.

Please give it a try and share your feedback. You can discuss Rain Droplet and Ripple in the Ripplexchange forums, and also find people with whom to trade:

https://ripplexchange.com/

Here you can also acquire Ripple support, hosting, and VoIP for Bitcoin or Ripplized pay:

https://ripplexchange.com/net/

Again, please try out Rain Droplet and share your thoughts!

What better way to complement your open p2p community money than with open p2p community credit? Ripple (http://ripple-project.org/) produces software that lets anyone establish credit relationships based on personal trust, and the emerging credit network allows payments to be routed through chains of interpersonal relationships.

You can use Ripple as a distributed credit network overlay, which seamlessly blends traditional and new economies. This makes financing easier, and also allows other tools such as automatic inter-currency exchange.

Right now there's an operational implementation available called Ripplepay (https://ripplepay.com/). You can sign up and use it freely. I think it would work great with bitcoin, as well as with other forms of credit such as national currencies, time, energy, etc. Right now there's discussion of adding a built-in bitcoin credit denomination, in the meantime it's possible to use an ad hoc substitute.

This should address some issues that have been raised in the community, including but not limited to the discussion in this thread (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=271.0). I encourage you to sign up at Ripplepay, set up your credit relationships with existing trust partners, and use it for payment and other financial options when suitable. I would be happy to extend some credit if you can show a good reason, and would accept credit at a decent rate.