* Ripple is fully open source since September 2013 (https://github.com/ripple)
* Ripple is fully able to be decentralized, currently a lot of validators (out of free will) put RippleLabs in their UNL though. This has nothing to do with whatever RippleLabs puts in their ripple.txt file on their website and it is NOT hard coded anywhere (check the source code).
* Issuing 1 billion BTC to yourself on ripple is just like writing a check to yourself for 1 billion USD - you first have to find someone who actually trusts you and gives you anything in return. If I sell an account on BitcoinChina with 50 million BTC as balance, would you buy it or would you mistrust BitcoinChina to have their books in order...?
* The example with MtGox loosing funds is especially weird, as it is exactly the same thing that happened with his own service. Also BTC on Ripple are as "real" as BTC on MtGox - you have no control over the underlying asset that you moved somewhere to be able to trade it. Ripple does not affect Bitcoins you have and gateways can only own Bitcoins you send them.
* Trusting multiple issuers in one currency gives a big fat warning sign in the client now, also it is possible to disable this default behaviour.
* You pay trading fees (more than 0.2% by the way) when trading on Bitstamp itself, also quite a few gateways now already have vowed to charge 0% transaction fees on their balances.
* XRP are given away for free or next to nothing, I never paid for any of them. Also having a business model does not make something a scam.

As I already wrote, while this is a noble effort, this is probably not enough for me to use in tax filings - I don't want to pay too much or too little just because of some edge case on a 3rd party JavaScript that even contains spelling errors in fuction names ("choise").

Also you should remove the www. when calling bitfinex' history (in getHistoryData, var html), it errored out on me because of that... [Edit: no, the issue was that I did not change the "FirstPage" and "LastPage" fields in the form, the www. is probably fine.]

Edit2:
@Bitfinex guys: It would be great to at least have a year mentioned in the ledger part until we can have csv exports...

Edit3:
I wrote a translator from Bitfinex history to ledger-cli and my ledger on Bitfinex does NOT balance to the same amounts it does on ledger (it is off by the whopping amount of 0.00000004 USD). Now the problem is that either your balance calculation is off (I only used Debit/Credit amounts displayed), the JavaScript CSV exporting script is wrong or ledger-cli has a problem...

Please move away from trusting blockchain.info and run this against bitcoind RPC... the added benefit would be that it could be easier to do this for altcoins too.

Paypalzahlungen können rückgängig gemacht werden, außerdem verbietet Paypal sowieso den Währungshandel (egal ob jetzt Bitcoins oder sonstwas).

Die meisten Altcoins werden erstmal gegen BTC gehandelt, manche dann auch mit der Zeit gegen andere Währungen.

Unless you set a no-ripple flag, yes (also you get wanrd about that by the client). Why would you trust someone in China for USD though?!

As a user or a gateway? Please talk to a lawyer about this.

Have a look on that list... There are several Ripple gateways in China who operate already for quite some time (in CNY though). I have no idea how they deal with foreigners, if you speak chinese, please contact them.

Ask a lawyer, not in a forum thread about a page that re-listed Ripple.

Ask a lawyer, not in a forum thread about a page that re-listed Ripple. I have no idea of your jurisdiction you're in, so there's that...

I am still not sure what you want to be? A simple user of Ripple, a gateway or a market maker... gateways might have issues in China if they allow Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals. If their users buy BTC with CNY deposited on Ripple however, there's nothing they can do about it.

Just by denominating something in USD does not mean you do business in the US, I am not so sure what you are trying to do though.


In the end I would anyways not recommend to trust multiple issuers for one currency on Ripple unless you really know what you are doing and want to accomplish. If you are happy with either Bitstamp or RippleChina's USD, why would you need both? Also if you are concerned or unsure about the default implicit 1:1 market making, just disable it.

Ripple would be called "scam" far more after you take a look at the amount of transactions there... Transactions on Ripple are not only moving value, they are also used to post or update trust lines as well as market offers, thus the volume of them is MUCH higher than you might suspect, which then again looks "susicious" or "pumped".

This (as well as the amount of transactions) can be easily gamed. Also as long as miners get paid transaction fees AND coinbase transactions, costs per transaction are actually much higher than actual fees.

Proof of Stake and Consensus based systems also have it MUCH cheaper to confirm transactions which is reflected in lower fees. Comparing fees and volume only would make sense for the same class of coins (e.g. PoW coins) and STILL lead to some very strage things.

Also the page is called "coinmarketcap", not "coinfeecomparison".

Ripple is not a cryptocurrency - it could be very possible that Ripple gets widespread use as payment system while Bitcoins are the major cryptocurrency used for settling these payments.

XRP are the native asset on Ripple and a cryptocurrency, I don't think they will be dominant though - just like NXT or Mastercoins they act more like a trading token than a store of value.

This is only true if you use a gateway that does not have 100% reserves (you do this every day by having a bank account by the way).

In most western countries you are NOT allowed to do that unless you have a full banking license.

A speculator in the sense of market maker will always have to have deposited his/her funds at a Ripple gateway beforehand, the losses etc. are just the same as someone buying BTC at 1200 on MtGox and selling in a panic at 400 - it does only concern the customers of that exchange, not the funds themselves.

A gateway itself is hopefully a legal entity with regular audits and maybe even open book accounting within your reach and legislation. If they try to steal from you, sue them because they are not allowed by law to do so.

Currently Bitcoin exchanges are far more likely to make a run with your money, the way they are set up...

I would suggest (since XRP, MSC et. al. would fall in this category) to split the display in 2 categories:

(Currently) inflating float coins
and
(Currently) stable/falling float coins

Inflating would mean that there are still coins created out of thin air (aka. coinbase transactions) and within a certain period of time there will be MORE units of this coin available for transfer than before.

Stable/deflating means that all planned coins have been issued and it is not planned or possible to create more. These coins need to be issued in a way, that they could at least theoretically be spent, e.g. issuing 21 million BTC to a black hole address and then pulling them with a special transaction from there instead of "coinbase" would NOT make it stable float, issuing 100 billion XRP to OpenCoin/RippleLabs and them promising to distribute 55 billion over time does make them stable float, even if not all have been distributed (because they could theoretically enter the market at any time).

This would mean that some coins will "change sides" over time (e.g. Bitcoin will become stable float somewhere around 2140, Protoshares as far as I understood it much earlier) while others are designed to inflate infinitely.

The reason for this is, as others put it so "elegantly" as "scamcoins", that it might be hard to compare market caps of something that is slowly increasing and a lot of activity that goes down once the amout of units expands with something that enters as a huge amount which is not or slowly decreasing with activity rising over time while adoption grows. IMHO "mining" does not really play a role in distinguishing these 2 types and it seems you mean "it is possible to create new units of these coins by mining" anyways with "mineable".


As a second remark:
I'd like to see sources added for the volume and price of the individual coins, especially BTC, maybe also XRP (since it seems to me you use the number from bitcoincharts.com which reflects only a single market: XRP/BTC.Bitstamp).
Also I'd like to hear your stance on what is considered a "market" that you would add as data source - after all it would be trivial to set up a web page, deposit BTC and XXX, trade these back and forth and create huge wolumes out of nowhere. Which criteria need to be met and how do you deal for example with the fact that BTC are also sold for EUR - do you ignore this, convert EUR to USD or do something else?

Final remark to the new influx of daily trolls:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=381016.0
I doubt RippleLabs paid anything ("Ripple" itself is not an entity, it is software), just like the Bitcoin Foundation did not pay to have BTC listed.

Yes, I have a _lot_ of entries in my ledger and that's only mostly from lending! Also in my tax statement I need to use not USD values, so I probably need to get daily USD/EUR rates and calculate profit/loss for every day in EUR.

Please, after nearly one year allow us to download a csv version of the ledger!

Feel free to submit a pull request then, the client was open source from the beginning by the way:
https://github.com/ripple/ripple-client

10.0.0.2 ist übrigens eine IP in einem lokalen Netzwerk... da wird wohl eher kein Litecoin Node laufen.

Seriously, could the "RIPPLE = SCAM" people calm down a bit?

You have been heard loud and clear by now and are just spamming the thread with 0 new information other than declaring your personal opinion.

Ripple is more similar to BitPay than Bitcoin, so you as a business owner would be interested in accepting any kind of payment but receiving USD. You would likely NOT accept XRP as currency but rather find a trustworthy gateway and accept USD from them (BitPay is the "gateway" for a readily made BTC --> USD market for example).

0. is not really a question but yes, in the end you will have some costs probably for withdrawing money from your gateway, just like right now it might cost you money to withdraw from a Bitcoin exchange. You could try to leave all/a part of that money on Ripple and pay whatever you need to pay for with this, in the end however receiving money likely is never totally for free and/or risk free, even in a pure Bitcoin setting. Ripple won't change that.

1. You should trust them (actually in most cases you only need to trust a single gateway, which I think you mean when you say "middleman") because they are based in your local jurisdiction, licensed as money service provider and have a good track record as well as doing good service. Gateways are even a little bit "less" than a Bitcoin exchange (they only need to deal in one single currency and offer a very limited service range - deposit and withdrawal) so if you have trusted Bitcoin exchanges or merchant services so far, use the same measures you used to trust these ones to also find a trusted gateway. Your clients can use this or any other gateway on Ripple, as long as there is a market somehow between the 2 currencies (e.g. BTC by Bitstamp can be somehow traded for USD by Peercover) they are able to pay you.

2. This is a business opportunity, gateways do not need to deal with BTC or anything not known to local regulators at all, so it should be relatively straightforward for any enterpreneur to set up a small business that processes NZD deposits and withdrawals to Ripple. Until this is the case, you can use whatever gateway you trust and that can actually wire you money, your customers could for example use BTC to pay you then. Lack of local gateways is currently one of the problems of Ripple, but businesses don't pop up over night after all. If you serve a very local market by the way, I am wondering why you are even on a Bitcoin forum, I'm sure there are local payment networks in NZ that are more useful and trusted than either Ripple and BTC - Ripple might help you in the future, BTC might be appealing to you because of philisophical reasons or whatever else, both are likely not THAT great if you just have a very domestic market until any of them have a FAR larger market share than currently.

3. Hard to say, to just enable payments, you can simply give them a link/URL (https://ripple.com/wiki/Ripple_URIs) that they can click on and their preferred client pops up. To really teach them all about the system might be a bit out of scope for a merchant, I guess? Unfortunately guides etc. for end users are as rare as for Bitcoin in its infancy, Ripple currently struggles more with getting gateways and market makers on board than convincing merchants - I wouldn't recommend very much to only rely on Ripple as payment network right now, maybe keep it as an option for the future, similar to pure Bitcoin payments (it took Coinbase and BitPay also some time to get traction even in the tiny Bitcoin ecosystem). My guess is that within 1-2 years the focus will shift from the more backend and trading side towards end user and merchant integration, the speed of that will be determined by adoption from gateways and traders.

4. By open markets, anyone that wants to can provide liquidity and make markets within Ripple, currently also quite easily in a relatively anonymous way (you don't need to register with Bitstamp to buy their USD on Ripple for example - you will need to do KYC though to withdraw them to your bank account later, if you want to do that). Market depth is actually a concern (even still with Bitcoin), the big difference to the (if you use the ripplescam.org pictures) "distributed" Bitcoin exchange market is that Ripple's markets are far more interconnected and there might be several paths to use for trades than just a single order book between currencyA and currencyB.

The informations on there are mostly wrong or misleading and there is no way to post comments to give a different opinion or updates (they are just not being "approved") like Ripple actually being Open Source for months now.

Please do some real research, https://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin+scam turns up also pages that are very similar to ripplescam.org and still I rarely see people around here arguing that Bitcoin itself is a scam.

Well, just let me state that I did not open this bounty there and I also don't know who did (maybe c0inbuster did that?).

I wish anyone trying to do this all the best though and hope to see some progress there of course.

Ripple ist eine dezentrale exchange, was zentral vergeben wurde sind ripples oder auch XRP genannt.

Sie werden nicht zentral verwaltet, nur zentral herausgegeben im Gegensatz zu zB bitcoins die anteilig nach Rechenleistung und ein bisschen Zufall verteilt werden.

Es gibt Möglichkeiten xrp mit Rechenleistung zu erhalten, das ist aber eben eine temporäre Aktion und hat nichts mit Ripple an sich zu tun sondern ist eben eine Idee von Ripplelabs um die Dinger fair zu verteilen.

VirWoX ist der EINZIGE kommerzielle Anbieter weltweit der mir bekannt ist, der seit Jahren PayPal Zahlungen entgegennimmt und es erlaubt Bitcoins dafür zu erstehen.
Das auch noch als österreichische Firma...

Natürlich sind die Aufschläge wahnsinnig hoch, aber immerhin hast du in 48h deine 0.072 BTC (effektiver Kurs: knapp 700 EUR pro BTC --> 50 / 0,072 ), auch Sonntags. Eine Banküberweisung wäre sonst erst ab Montag überhaupt draußen, außerdem kannst du erstmal ein paar Tage Wartezeit für Dokumentenverifizierung bei anderen Anbietern einkalkulieren.

Making a distinction between (either currently or forever) inflating money base coins and stable/deflating ones might be useful. Coins could even change "sides" over time, e.g. in 2140 Bitcoin would move from "inflating float" to "stable/deflating float".

Boycotting a site because of this is not very constructive in my opinion...

Well, I'm not "Ripple", just like you are not "Bitcoin", but here are my answers to your questions.

It is assumed that you have the following setup:
A Ripple account (Address: r123foobar) with ~100 XRP that you somehow got (e.g. giveaway or you bought them from Bitstamp).
A trust line (and account) with SnapSwap for USD/SnapSwap of up to 1000 USD.
A trust line (and account) with Bitstamp for BTC/Bitstamp of up to 5 BTC.
The current market price for 1 BTC is assumed to be 700 USD per BTC.
You have a US based bank account with 500 USD and are able to send funds from there via bank wire to SnapSwap.
You have 3 BTC in your local wallet and are able to send them to any address you like on the block chain.

1.)
* transfer your BTC from your local wallet to Bitstamp's deposit address (log into your account on Bitstamp to check for yours)
* withdraw your deposited BTC from Bitstamp to your Ripple address
* send a payment in USD to SnapSwap's address, using your unique identifier ("destination tag") as per their instructions. Ripple will ask you which currency/currrencies you want to use to pay for this --> select BTC/Bitstamp.
* You now should have received USD in your SnapSwap account, I am not sure how they do withdrawal (as I don't use them), I would imagine you log into yuor account there and have the choice to move the USD to a bank account of your choice or some account that you pre-registered with them when setting up your account there.

2.)
* Send USD to SnapSwap's bank account (again, no idea how they work in detail, I imagine you have to send a bank wire and mention an account ID or so in the transaction?)
* Withdraw the USD from SnapSwap to your Ripple address (probably they have something for this in their interface?)
* (Here you can either just use Bitstamp's Bitcoin bridge or your Bitstamp account explicitly, I'll use the latter.) Pay the amount of BTC you want to trade to Bitstamp's address, using your destination tag (again, check Bitstamp's instructions of how to deposit funds to them via Ripple), Ripple will offer you to pay in USD/SnapSwap, select this.
* Withdraw your BTC from your Bitstamp account to any Bitcoin address of your choice

The other party is any liquidity provider on Ripple, they are only important to set prices, you do not need to trust them or care about them. They previously have deposited funds at either gateway and offer these to you in exchange for what you have. They set up a trade offer for that on the ledger and it can be executed whenever needed, they don't need to get active for that.

3.)
* Find a gateway you trust (a gateway is similar to a "webwallet" provider or an exchange website - whenever you can "deposit" coins, this could be a gateway operator in Ripple too that you apparently trust to some extent with your coins) that allows deposits in whatever coin you want to deposit.
* After depositing your coins with that gateway, they will issue you the sent amount on Ripple and you can start trading, make markets or just hold the balance on Ripple. They most likely will also offer you to send you the coins on the respective block chain if you want to withdraw your balance from Ripple. How this happens in detail depends on the gateway.

4.)
* Get the Ripple address of the person you want to send something to.
* go to https://ripple.com/client/#/send (or something similar on whatever client you use) and enter the address there, then select the currency you want to use and the amount.
* click on "send [currency]" and you will go to a confirmation screen where you can decide which path should be used or which of your currencies actually should be used to pay for this.
* confirm and done - your selected payment amount is gone and traded for whatever your recipient wanted to receive and it has been credited in her/his account.


Some notes:
While it is easy to use Ripple as an exchange, its big advantage lies in being able to settle payments using whatever you want to pay for whatever the other party wants to receive. If Ripple gained widespread use, not "Bitcoin" would be out of business, but BitPay! You as a bitcoiner would likely have your largest part of coins in cold storage and a few on Ripple, paying whatever you want to pay for with these off the blockchain. From time to time (if you receive a big amount of BTC or are running low on funds) you would do a (slow and expensive) transaction on the blockchain to top up either your cold or Ripple wallet.
Currently it is very easy to bridge from Ripple to Bitcoin, so if you for example are somehow bearish on BTC (and are afraid they might crash any time) you can hold USD on Ripple but still pay to any BTC address with ease in case you want to buy something for BTC. Maybe soon someone will do the same for e.g. LTC, then it would be much easier for people to actually use their LTC for payment and keep them in LTC for the longest amount of time possible, just converting what they actually need right now.
The nice thing with cryptocurrencies is that they are very "binary" in the sense of receiving them and owning them, so gateways are more comfortable to use them for deposits than e.g. PayPal. Also they are less regulated, so AML/KYC is sometimes not that much of a concern... Still RippleLabs is trying very hard to also venture towards fiat gateways instead of optimizing Ripple for cryptocurrencies, which again might be a bit off-putting for Bitcoin enthusiasts. In the end it still means that everybody wins, since fiat enthusiats can easily pay in BTC via Ripple right now and hopefully in the future hardcore Bitcoiners can use a lot of fiat payments networks settling in BTC (e.g. an outgoing PayPal gateway would enable anyone to pay ANY FREAKIN' PAYPAL MERCHANT in BTC or LTC or Deogecoins or NXT or... on your end while they don't even realize it!)