What happens if I "receive" a Casascius coin in RL and I want to exchange it for the real asset but the person who made it already took the money from it - or worse: runs a hidden node that will double-spend with a high fee any coin that I try tro move off a Casascious coin so I have no way other than trust to spend the BTC?

The problem you describe happened already dozens of times in Bitcoinland and it always ended in tears and "hacks": mybitcoin webwallets, pirateat40's BTCS&T, GLBSE, Bitcoin-24, Tradehill, inputs.io...
Ripple is NOT designed to save you from your own stupidity (of trusting someone with your funds who doesn't deserve it), just like with BTC you can build insured systems on top of it, but the basis is still that you need a trusted counterparty to keep your assets, just like any centralized exchange that you use (or physical coin manufacturer...).

The problem Ripple solves is that to actually use Bitcoin in most cases, you need to exchange BTC for something else. Ripple has a use case far closer to BitPay than Bitcoin, on Bitcoin you can ONLY receive BTC while on Ripple you can receive both XRP and anything you trust to be redeemable. Yes, the latter can be exploited (just as it has been in bitcoinland for years) however it can also be put to good use, as you see from the amount of great enthusiasm people have towards Coinbase and BitPay, who are in the end centralized closed source services that need to be trusted by both merchants and users to keep their payment data safe (BitPay would be THE ideal honeypot for CIA/NSA/GCHQ!) and to actually process transactions and pay out as advertised.
Ripple takes this concept one step further by decoupling merchants, asset holders (=gateways) and payers by introducing open markets for different assets and introducing market makers (the "traders" on Bitcoin exchanges BitPay sells their coins to).

I don't get how people don't understand this after 1-2 hours of reading and still claim that Ripple is so complex, impossible to understand or anything like that, on the other hand it might be a large intellectual feat of realizing that any service that you use in bitcoinland that does NOT allow you to privately sign transactions with your own local key offline that you choose yourself is something that is a trusted service and could also work as Ripple gateway with the added benefit that balances would not be locked in on that platform.

There are links (the USD prices) to the pages where these volume numbers come from.

It might be useful to create something like "xrpaverage.com" that works similar to bitcoinaverage and combines numbers from more markets. Currently only XRP/BTC.Bitstamp numbers are used, with bitcoincharts as source.

So, how many BTC does Satoshi own exactly?

It works just fine on Firefox 26.0 here... maybe you have something like NoScript active?

Ripple != XRP

Ripple itself is a distributed exchange/marketplace and payment system, XRP is the native asset there.

Google did not get involved at all, Google Ventures did invest in OpenCoin (now RippleLabs) though (see http://www.gv.com/about/ - "GV provides seed, venture, and growth-stage funding to the best companies — not strategic investments for Google."). They also invested in Buttercoin (http://www.buttercoin.com/) by the way, who strive to build a kind of "franchise" Bitcoin exchange platform.

Unlike a lot of other cryptocurrencies or distributed marketplace projects, Ripple actually is developed by a staff of more than 2 dozen developers. Their focus is not really purely on Bitcoin though (while a lot of their staff comes from a Bitcoin background), so it is not really marketed towards them. Bitcoin is so easy to use on Ripple anyways, that there is no real need to convice bitcoiners in the first place in my opinion and I am glad that they focus their efforts rather on gaining more partners who build up fiat connections, something also the Bitcoin ecosystem still heavily struggles with (ever tried to withdraw from MtGox lately?).

Ein paar Pool backends sind Open Source, sowohl zentrale, als auch dezentrale wie z.B. p2pool

Well, looking at RAM requirements, I guess I'd recommend a live system from a USB stick if you just want to try the parser instead of a VM.

https://bitcoil.co.il/pool_analysis.pdf könnte weiterhelfen, Meni hat das damals recht gut zusammengeschrieben.

znort never intended it to run on Windows, if you post a bounty maybe someone is able to compile it? Otherwise, just get going, theoretically the libraries used should be available on Windows too.

As it parses the transactions, it likely depends on how close your "different chain" implements these compared to Bitcoin.

The only issue is that you are looking at freaking market caps, not issued float or trade volume charts!

If you have issues with trading volume, go sort by trading volume if you so desire - but please stop complaining that a page that is dedicated to displaying market caps actually displays market caps of currencies you might not like. If you have issues with that indicator, please register "coinexchangevolume.com" and do your volume comparisons there. I tried to offer solutions on how to divide inflating and deflating coins with 0 feedback and I am also not too happy that people get worked up about stuff that just looks really bad because it is a bad indicator to use for 2 quite different issuing concepts.

I have explained Ripple and how it works now multiple times here in the past few days, this is not the right thread for it though, just check my post history and open a thread for your actual questions in the altcoin (if it is about XRP) or some other appropriate (if it is about exchange functionality or economics for example) forum.

Also:
Please (as noted multiple times in the thread with the poll): RIPPLE != XRP! XRP are called "ripples" (which is a damn unfortunate name imho., even "ripplecoins" would have been better to distinguish the asset from the payment system!) and they are far less important as an investment (since they suck as store of value in my opinion) than any other coin listed. They are not designed and not intended to be hoarded, unfortunately the relatively high market cap has attracted self-proclaimed "investors" that got a bit of the typical "to the moon!" fever.

At least please change the name listed from "Ripple" to "Ripples (XRP)", "ripples" or something like that - currently it seems like comparing gaming consoles companies and listing Nintendo as "Wii Points Issuer". This stuff is what they make money with, not their main product.

I spent the afternoon to hack a crude translator from the json file(s) that the script from wassupia (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=229438.msg4041643#msg4041643) outputs to the file format of ledger (http://www.ledger-cli.org/).

I am not an accountant, so I might have done some bookings to various accounts wrong, also it needs to be severely cleaned up (and has some limitations that come from Bitfinex - e.g. no year is mentioned in their log or it takes some time to actually even get a date + time, not this "xx minutes ago" bullshit timestamp).

It works though and is enough to get an overview of amounts earned/lost and fees paid etc., so I guess it's fine to just post it, maybe someone wants to use it too.
Pastebin: http://pastebin.com/fepuCfCW

You need to put this in a seperate file (e.g. bitfinex2ledger.py) and save usd.json and btc.json in the same folder next to it.
It will simply print the formatted data to stdout, redirect that to a file if you need to.

I used all the log messages that I found in my ledgers, there are likely more (e.g. Litecoin deposits/withdrawals and whatever OKPAY is...) - it will print "UNKNOWN ENTRY... DATA: ..." in case it cannot find a match - in that case feel free to post the data portion here (just fill in random digits if you are concerned about exposing stuff) then I will add this to the script.

Read the link in the OP.

Also volume on Ripple (for XRP as well as other currencies) is much higher than that, it seems coinmarketcap only looks at the single XRP/BitstampBTC market (which is large, but not even the largest, see https://ripplecharts.com/markets which also gives an incomplete but better overview).

Proudla presented by the creator of inputs.io and coinlenders, Mr. TradeFortress!

Die Karten von Cryptcard gibt's immer noch ohne Probleme zu kaufen, nur eben nicht von der Website.

Flls ihr da echt so großen Bedarf habt, fragt einfach mal, ob euch ein vertrauenswürdiger Österreicher hier ein paar der Dinger ersteht und zusendet.

This is like claiming that the more cars of a certain brand crash and kill their passengers the more successful this manufacturer likely is, since you need to sell more cars to kill more people. I do not like this metric at all, so I guess we have to disagree on that one.

Well the thing is that it would be easy that way to manipulate transaction fee charts in Ripple (since fees there are several orders of magnitude smaller than in PoW coins) and other similar coins and fees there do not necessarily represent the amount of "investedness" into the system. Transaction volume might be another indicator that looks nice at first, still it again can be easily gamed (I can afford to replicate every single transaction ever in all of Bitcoin into Ripple for XRP worth less than 20 USD in fees) in coins that have smaller fees.

For about 2 decades, yes - and I could do it completely for free, as I got my XRP in giveaways.

Edit:
The main point is that users paying high fees is a poor measure of performance - cash transactions have 0 explicit fees but amount to huge sums compared to BTC or Ripple.

I am for example quite sure that VirWoX with their large markups makes more money in fees than some far larger/higher volume BTC exchanges. Would you consider them "larger" because of that? Ideally there are 0 fees and the closer you get to this ideal, the harder it gets to be considered "large" by you.

If I destroy 1 XRP for fun as transaction cost, this would have been enough to pay for 100k transactions while costing me about 3 US cents and it would leave quite a spike on that chart.

You could look at the amounts locked away as reserves (both base and variable) as a measure of being "invested" into XRP, still that would have no real equivalence in other coins.

No, you are trading USD IOUs from one issuer to IOUs from another issuer - you do not issue your own.

I would recommend to consult a tax specialist + lawyer before dealing with BTC as well, an issue is that for example unlike cash BTC can be traced back indefinitely far. If someone who owned your coins before you claims they are stolen and you should pay them back then they have definite proof that you actually do have a part of their property in your posession. BTC are not fungible.

Regulatory issues in Ripple are probably much less/easier as you can refer for example to the EU directive 2009/110/EC (http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/emoney/) instead of first having to explain who actually could be an "issuer" of the BTC that you own.

If miners get a high subsidy from coinbase transactions, fee markets might not really develop at these early stages, even in PoW coins.
Also you did not answer to the "not every coin needs to pay miners anyways" argument... Fees on Ripple for example are more fighting spam than helping in any measurable way to deflate the money issued.

Amount of coins moved/transacted or "bitcoin days destroyed" kinda metrics might be more useful, but again not even applicable or even possible in all coins.

You talk about the money people HAVE to pay for fees, the amount people WANT to pay for fees is likely 0. If coinbase subsidies are high, few people HAVE to pay for fees, that's why they are ridiculously low in BTC for example. https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction shows to pay for the current hash rate it costs over 60(!) USD per transaction! Only a tiny part of this is paid via fees, the largest part is paid via inflation.