Well, Ripple itself IS a decentralized payment network, not a centralized one (that would be only true after my patches - project is at the time on hold though, as it would require disabling too much functionality to work for my use case... simpler solutions work better with centralized systems).

As I said "Cripple" is only the working title, I would ask anyways beforehand or just use a different name, like "inputts"... and I don't really see why I should be "very worried" about a company's ToS halfway around the globe.

By the way - Bitcoin is trademarked too and owned by MtGox.

Im schlechtesten Fall (gerade Linie nach oben/unten) ist Trading genauso gut wie B&H, im Idealfall bringt es weit mehr - allerdings mit dem Risiko auch weit mehr Verlust zu bringen.

Ob es sich lohnt kommt immer auf deine eigene Strategie (das hat wenig mit "Können" oder "Gepür", eher mit "Disziplin" zu tun!) an.

How exactly are these numbers calculated?

https://github.com/emarkproject/DEM/commits/master - genau 1 einziger Commit seit Beginn, ansonsten 0 Entwicklungsarbeit, nicht mal der Versuch von Bitcoin-QT aktuelle Neuerungen rüberzuziehen und zu integrieren...

Wie soll man so einer "fire-and-forget" Lösung vertrauen?

They seem to market far less towards bitcoiners nowadays... more towards the other ~99.9% of the population.

It is definitely around, very much alive and has probably more code written per week than all the altcoins in this forum together in a month. It works amazingly well for Bitcoins, a gateway recently added Google wallet so you can now buy XRP (that can be converted to BTC then) with credit cards for ~5% fee flat for example. I usually just simply use them and try to not preach or convince people around here of anything (it didn't work when Bitcoin was viewed as ponzi scam, why should it work for Ripple?) and just help or clear confusion (like the infamous "if A trusts B and B trusts C, A trusts C!!111" - which is simply wrong, as trust is not transitive!).

Server (in C++): https://github.com/ripple/rippled
Client (in Javascript): https://github.com/ripple/ripple-client
Library for talking to the server in JS: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib
(since Friday) Java client library: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib-java

Also their new website is kinda neat, including a live ticker of transactions etc.

Anyways, they are definitely not dying out and are also still expanding their team, currently being one of the larger companies that came from Bitcoin at this point I guess.

Well, I thought of extending Ripple to be used as back-end to a site like inputs.io or similar, working title "Cripple" (centralized Ripple). No, this is not sarcasm, there could be some benefits actually to this.

What more people wanted to see I think was a Ripple system that uses BTC instead of XRP for transaction fees and as market central currency - which would slow it down to Bitcoin speeds (if you don't accept 0-conf transactions, which is recommendable - but accepting them might be possible if you have many validators that all must have this transaction in their transaction list in Bitcoin + miners publishing the transactions they will include).

As Ripple by itself only gains traction because of its gateways, my guess is that the replacement of XRP with BTC itself is not too much of an issue to convince gateways to support this "Bitripple" fork, especially if it also has some downsides. Time will tell, maybe there are already some people working in secret on that? Publicly, I haven't seen anything on github at least...

It used to be an average of all interests, until someone managed to lend out something like 0.00001 USD for a few million % for a day, driving VIR so high that nearly all VIR loans were incredibly expensive and borrowers were force liquidated.

I'm not too sure why it is not possible to make VIR simply: (sum_of_all_interest_paid_in_the_last_hour/sum_of_all_loans_taken)*100 (times 365 then, to get a yearly number - while for traders everywhere they only see daily numbers by the way!).

Currently it seems to be something along the lines of an average of all loans in the past few days but capped at something to make it not change that quickly (even though Bitcoin can change much faster!). Seems I really need to build a lending bot after all that places orders instead of trusting that VIR gives even decent returns (it does NOT, compared to the market).

Well, there were some cases were interests were only paid for 23 or so hours for a day... it is really hard to say from the data Bitfinex provides if you made a loss or if they paid everything in full, as you only get a single entry in your ledger once per day.

...WHAT?

Where is that documented and since when is this in effect? I used Auto-Lend with VIR as a easy mechanism to provide funds and still gain if there is a jump in the market but I was already quite disappointed by the returns from this rally... Is only the increase capped or the decrease as well? Why do you regulate this kind of stuff with hidden undocumented algorithms anyways instead of having an open market for lending rates?

"100% pre-issued": Agreed, though Ripple is not XRP.

"arbitrarily distributed": Kinda agreed, not completely arbitrarily (Bitcoin is/was being FAR more arbitrarily distributed). I don't see the bad side of this though.

"continuously managed": Well, only with consensus of the community, like Bitcoin. As RipleLabs holds still a supermajority of XRP, they can devalue the currency at will, act and trade accordingly.

"proprietary currency": I'm not too sure what you mean by that, probably that only one entity controls a lot of it and initially controlled all of it? Again, you confuse "Ripple" with "XRP.


Also what you didn't repeat but what I far less agree with are the following statement(s):
"Which does nothing to change the fact that ripple.com is inherently a centralized and proprietary system, with de-facto and de-jure unlimited control by Ripple Labs (nee OpenCoin)."

"centralized system": Currently, still quite true, as there are few validators besides RL that I added to my UNL. This can and will change though and it already is far less centralized than any other exchange out there, including Localbitcoins with their escrow (=IOU) function.

"proprietary system": Again, I'm not too sure what you mean by that. Every piece of code to bootstrap and run your own Ripple system is available under Open Source licenses. Yes, Ripple is mainly developed by Ripple Labs, that does not make them proprietary. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software - maybe you mean "commercial" instead?)

"de-facto unlimited control": For one single instance of fraud, yes. They can probably (with quite a bit of effort) produce a ledger that suddenly does anything they want. This is maybe even true to a larger extent than BTC mining pools doing a huge double spend or rewriting a part of history. It will also have an even larger influence on their trustworthiness and likely sums that were stolen that way wouldn't be released by gateways, similar to the hacking incident at MtGox some time ago. After RL prooved themselves untrustworthy, Ripple would be more or less dead I guess. Combine that with the high chance that IOUs can NOT be redeemed if they screw something up (the only asset in Ripple are XRP, IOUs depend on counter parties! There is no need to steal XRP for RL, as they own far too many of them anyways...) and I personally would say they have a lower incentive to cheat or game the system than e.g. mining pools in BTC (who have only to play by the rules because miners are likely also a bit emotional about how their money is made - if they weren't there woudl be some serious issues in Bitcoinland, like pools gaming Satoshi's dice...)

"de-iure unlimited control": It is Open Source. I don't know too much about this american idiocy of patenting software, but I doubt that this would be enforceable after releasing the software into the public with a license that says: "Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.".

No, I got from you:
This is your private opinion, not a fact, unless backed by arguments or reasons.
I am of a very differnt opinion in a lot of these points, on the other hand I fear I'd waste the time of both of us if I start now discussing everything in detail and I honestly don't see the point, just as I don't preach about Bitcoin to people who think it's a scam. Over time they will learn by themselves that it is not or it is a failure anyways.

Also I do certainly NOT promote XRP, a currency that I like for its idea (acting as path shortener in Ripple) but that I would certainly not promote like Bitcoin.

Siehe https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179885.msg3311359#msg3311359

Der Kommentar war mMn gerechtfertigt, nicht dumm. Gerade hier im deutschen Forenteil gibt es einige Leute, die recht schnell mit rechtlichen Konsequenzen drohen (ich habe z.B. eine tolle PN von candoos "Vertragspartner" bekommen, weil ich es einmal gewagt habe zu sagen, dass das nicht ganz ordentlich aussieht) oder jede kleinste Verfehlung aufzeigen aber selber dann in bester Fußballermanier reagieren (die \/ Geste nach einem Foul...), falls es mal sie betrifft.

I am not too sure if you mean the same by "centralized", "unlimited control" and "proprietory" as I do...

If you dislike it, just fork it and build your own, better network. Same as with SSL - you can easily issue certificates yourself or with Bitcoin (we are in the Altcoin section after all, where far ofer 90% of "coins" are just simple forks) as well. If you are not using tha Satoshi chain, you can even run with the exact same rules and still not send any money to anyone claiming to accept "Bitcoin".

I read in quite a few threads that Ripple will be immediately forked as the idea behind the system is good but the implementation with XRP (or the distribution of these) sucks. Well, so far I have yet to even see any large fork on github. Even in the Open Source announcements the possibility of forks is mentioned.

... if it is even possible for you to differ between a version that was printed at the company or a version that was sent as PDF from the company and printed out by me. They usually look completely the same in my case, though I for example chose to get 1-2 utility bills still via snail mail for exactly these AML/KYC reasons. Sometimes you get a weird web page with account overviews, but mostly I go the exact document that would have been printed + mailed, just as a PDF instead of a physical copy.

As hazek is watching, I don't dare to recommend to just print the damn thing on a good laser printer, fold it twice and scan it instead of complaining that PDFs aren't accepted... but I would recommend this, if he weren't here.

In case you didn't notice, in the last month the source code for rippled, the only component that was not publicly available with an Open Source license got published.

Ja, allerdings hat keiner was davon, wenn man hier anfängt rumzuspammen und 100€ Amazongutscheine um 150€ zu verkaufen versucht. Klar kann man's probieren... aber wirklich sinnvoll sind solche Preise z.B. nicht. Wenn man darauf hingewiesen wird, ist das auch keine Gier sondern einfach ein Tipp, dass es so vermutlich nicht geht (falls doch: Biete 100€ Amazongutscheine bis auf Widerruf um 1 BTC! Ich garantiere dafür, dass ich die Dinger privat kaufe, ohne Zwischenhandel.)

Since you are trying to be a "meta"-exchange, any plans to integrate Kraken? They are relatively new players but seem to have their bank behind them (unlike lots of other exchanges) and are really accessible in the EU. Not so much in the US (10 USD deposit fee), but still...

They have thin order books but that does not mean much for the moment...

Bitcoins are not totally anonymous and are also not designed to be.

Well, point #3 can be disabled by a setting (Edit: Also it is wrong - if you trust your boss and he trusts his daughter, this does NOT mean you can end up with USD.daughter unless you trust her too. You can disable 1:1 implicit trading/"rippling" via a setting, that's what I initially thought was the perceived problem. Him being bankrupted because he set up a [too high] trust line to his daughter is outside of the system and also not likely with the current use cases. Gateways are encouraged to NOT trust anyone and let the markets be made either from other of their accounts or 3rd parties.), #2 is wrong (you CAN be compensated as liquidity provider and 0% interest is not part of the system but part of the individual agreements of gateways with their users) and #1 is something that is true for MPEX as well, in case one deposits coins there.

Anyways, using colored coins, Ripple, Mastercoin or OpenTransactions will neither solve any issues at all with regards to regulations - only with regards to resilience and eliminating (exchange) operator risk. With neither of these systems (well, a bit with OpenTransactions...) there is any chance that you go on a holiday and suddenly your exchange has changed their ToS and you are to provide documents and whatnot or it has shut down.
There is still a good chance that "doxxing" can happen (check out Gigamining, once listed on MPEX by the way!), just that the business owner then will require KYC documentation, not the exchange platform.

Edit:
In case anyone is more interested in these "lemon laws" that are mentioned in the article linked by MPOE-PR, I can recommend the book http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/

Ja, besser gleich mal mit Klage drohen - kann ja nicht angehen sowas!