Well, it might be the case that WU sees ripplesync as an employee... I hope he doesn't scare them away/overwhelm them with his enthusiasm and makes clear from the beginning that WU needs to contact Ripple Labs actually.

You could simply lie when setting time stamps, so you could always mine with full power.
Still the attack won't be easy starting from Genesis, as you would need to do additional work to "pay"for the hills in difficulty that happened, on the other hand you would just need to start at the most recent checkpoint as "Genesis" anyways.
The only countermeasure is to release a new client with a new checkpoint and get everyone to switch. However if you are able to catch up with the main chain anyways, you likely have much more hashing power than all mongers combined and could pull off easier attacks too.

No, they don't all agree...
You only need some of the current core nodes in your unl to be sure to be part of the main chain, as compared to bitcoin where the Genesis block is simply compiled into the main client.
As ripple uses ledgers, this wouldn't work (you only need about 40 mb to get going, not 10+ GB of data). They could put some core nodes in their code, but then people would again complain that this is too centralized etc.

Your own server isn't useless, it is just a fork if you don't use the main ledger chain.

As answered above, TOR is just a way to get content delivered to your PC (anonymously hopefully).

As the network can be relatively slow and tedious from time to time, I'd recommend a general design that requires little/no scripts, does not rely on low latency (or continued communication at all) and that ideally also allows the user to authenticate you and to ensure the integrity of the information you send (e.g. a SSL certificate, doesn't have to be from a public CA).

Well, to be fair Bitcoin also is not really used as a currency at all - rather as a digital asset ("electronic gold"). Still both in Bitcoin and Ripple the possibility exists to use them in the originally planned/intended way. There is a cluster of accounts that are heavily interlinked for example and that most likely belong to the RippleClassic userbase. Just because new users choose not to use this model, does not mean it is not supported any more. It is a less likely use case though I admit and I personally also think Ripple will grow more by being something like the e-mail of payment systems (which also means that there will be huge mail providers like gmail or hotmail) rather than hawala 2.0.

With 2) I agree to some degree - it is a chicken-egg problem (if there is low liquidity, the system is not very interesting - see the trolling of QuantPlus leading to even lower liquidity etc.). What makes it different though is that the cost for entering the system as a liquidity provider is basically zero. Starting from BTC you can trade to nearly any IOU on the market and start to make that market. You do not have to have an order of at least 10000USD to hedge towards the Euro, you can just provide a single dollar and try to beat larger players by a tiny margin over time. I would also love to see easier options to market make (if you do trust more than 1 gateway especially in one currency, after all this means you are basically making money), but on the other hand this also enables more savy people in the meantime to get some nice profits.

You can do 2 but it might be against the ToS of your exchange platform to transfer to an address that is not yours. Check your ToS for more information.

The only decentralized/distributed exchange platform that actually accepts deposits (and is not just OTC) and has a somewhat active market I know of is Ripple.

If he did not actually break into your servers but only submitted requests to your service, you either are incompetent if your system did accept backdated orders or they would be denied anyways. 80 interactions in 10 minutes hardly seems like any DoS attack to me and how the hell are binary options even remotely able to be "unclear"?!

Admitting to stealing/freezing user funds (even if it is an unpleasant user) is definitely something that raises far more red flags for me than some random person claiming to be scammed.

Was sind denn "diverse Sicherheitsmerkmale" konkret?!

I did, they are more interested in it than in bitcoin, where they still don't really believe why people pay money for them.

Auf lange Sicht verlierst du IMMER 1% pro Spiel.

Je nach "Strategie" erhöhst du nur die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass du mal ordentlich im Plus oder Minus bist und nicht einfach nur 1% zahlst.

Bitcoinj supports Mike hearns idea of rapidly adjusted micropayment channels. If you coded your back end in java, you might be even more interested in that. I don't know if bitcoind will integrate something similar soon/ever.

It was already changed a few months ago to a 50 XRP account reserve and can be changed again, if a majority of validators accept a special transaction that changes this amount.

Seems like they slightly messed up the web-client (again) when releasing the new server version. Try reloading the client and clearing your cache with Ctrl+Shift+R, as advised here: https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3737

This assumes you are using the client on ripple.com and not your own one or other means of interfacing with Ripple...

You seem to switch interests quite quickly...

I definitely use Ripple and I am not a bank - it might be the case though that it wasn't designed for you (quite likely, as you seem to have troubles understading some things and/or using the client UI) or your ideological goals (e.g. you were upset when it was mentioned that Ripple tries to fit into existing laws instead of ignoring governmental regulations).
Depending on how the journey goes, in the future you might use Ripple without even realizing it (services like BitPay are easy to implement using Ripple) if you continue using Bitcoin or other crypto-currencies.

Sorry to see you go, at least you tried to understand more about something instead of just repeating heresay and half-truths or plainly refusing the idea from the beginning without being able to give any reason.

"Lots of micropayments" means e.g. sending someone 10 satoshis per word written? If yes, then anything on-chain would soon end up with enormous fees (relative to the outputs).

Maybe you can restructure your service in a way that people either get paid after a certain treshhold is eached (e.g. 0.1 BTC) or alternatively their balance gets cleared after 2 weeks of inactivity?

Inputs.io is NOT a bitcoin wallet, they issue internally transaferrable debt denominated in bitcoins that can be redeemed on demand. This is 100% the same as Paypal (you send them USD and you hope/trust that you can get a USD balance back). Coinbase seems to be a similar service, you deposit coins there and then you can redeem them (hopefully) some time in the future.

Bitcoin is not really built for (nearly) free Nano- or Micropayments, so it might make sense to use such a service provider, however you just have seen the risk and trust you put into the provider(s) of these services, as they can freeze or steal your coins at will (or out of bad luck/hacks/etc.).

(and similar statements before/after)

Imagine Bitcoin at it's infancy:
Satoshi publishes the initially mined chain (let's say with ~10 blocks) and a second user joins the network. This second user can now either generate a new genesis block or use the Satoshi chain. He chooses the latter and now user #3 can either start a new chain, or use the one from Satoshi and user #2 etc.

This is similar to how Ripple was running for quite some time now - third party validators can either start their new ledgers from 0 or join the one started by OpenCoin. This is still true today and in 5 years from now - everybody can choose freely to fire up rippled and start their own fork or use the one that was once 100% owned by 1 entity, then 50% by 2, then 33.3% by 3 etc.
Even if you have UNLs that do not contain Ripple Labs directly, you will either have to have someone who is on the main ledger in your UNL (or at least in your peer list...) or be on a forked net, just like in Bitcoin. Either you accept Satoshi as initial central bootstrapping entity or you don't. People can have vastly dissimilar UNLs by the way (and they maybe should) just as in Bitcoin you can have completely different miners and peers - if a miner builds on a different genesis block or a peer broadcasts a block based on a different genesis block though, you would regard them as invalid as Ripple would see a ledger that is not a result of the mainline ledger currently visible for example on s1.ripple.com.


Bold statement, though since a LOT of people do not have access to computers on this planet, that means you are likely in the bottom 50% or even 30% computer users in a western country.
You are actually trying to issue something that others should trust you, that you are competent to issue and redeem it. If reading (and asking without swearing/insulting ("Fuck it", "what the fuck is a gateway", "figure this shit out"...)) a few wiki pages is already too much, maybe you should look into hiring a consultant or taking private lessons. You current tone definitely does not encourage me to help you further. Also you do not really give hints on what your actual problem is, besides not understanding anything/being confused or frustrated. If you pose concrete questions (e.g. "I want to issue BTC IOUs from my ripple account, how do I do that and what do I have to keep in mind?") instead of "websocket?" (tried the Wikipedia page on that already?) this would also help people helping you.

Also keep in mind that issuing IOUs is something that likely is a regulated business in most countries, especially for fiat money. It is not really something that every user of Ripple would need to do at all and also right now there are FAR more people using Ripple more like a bank (in the sense of the payment processing part) than like a community credit system.

What did you expect?!

The only part that wasn't documented on the Wiki already was the P2P protocol (the protobuf part)...

Well, currently there are not THAT many servers out there, so a DDoS on all known node IPs might be at least quite disruptive. Killing only a few validators, even highly trusted ones though should(TM) not be problematic - also since they do only publish a signature per ledger and that's mostly it, so a validator can be easily relaunched on VPS servers or hidden behind known good nodes.

I would guess something below 10 USD should be a realistic amount that one would be willing to pay for a payment account in an unknown payment network - about 1/5th of what my credit card costs per year(!).

The minimum reserve amout is at 50 XRP atm. though and might go down, if the validators agree - 100 XRP are likely lasting for at least a VERY long time or maybe even a lifetime.