And nobody other then you knows how much is out of your control.

No, they control the supply, so theoretically they can get as much as they want to a bunch of shills they control, yet very little to honest participants. Then the shills can start playing the trick of "moving money left hand to right" publicly and push the price up. This will work very effectively at the beginning when you want to create the hype.

That would be a problem with Ripple developers and XRP investors because if a competing network outdoes them, through both good means and bad means, the value of their XRPs will plummet.

You should read my last sentence, I do not worry about Opencoin manipulating the XRP market. What I worry about is some other organizations(like a botnet for example) creating a Ripple clone(if they release the source code then why not), and tries to outdo Ripple(by both manipulating their own currency and working honestly), all because they want the currency they create in the XRP way to appreciate, like what Jed openly admitted. And since they are a botnet, they can create thousands of validating nodes and ask them to be all cooperative and helpful when it comes to validating the transactions and run it like a good network, after all, it's Ripple's goal to make the validations costless, right?

Whether Ripple will  become a good model for a payment network remains to be seen, what I am convinced however, is that XRP is a bad investment.

Thanks for the information!

With mining, the rate of generation of bitcoins is provable mathematically, and the resistance to pump and dump is strong.

Think about this: can you pump and dump Bitcoin without anyone knowing? It's theoretically possible but very hard to do, especially during its initial stage. The total supply is fixed mathematically(provable), and the distribution of the supply can be changed by anyone who wants to mine,  and the ownership is, again, mathematically provable. As long as there are enough innocent participants mining, the price will be determined by the free market as no single entity controls the supply.

So let's get to XRP, can you know how many XRPs are in circulation? Probably not. Can you know how XRPs are allocated by Opencoin? No. Let's quote Joel Katz here:


original link: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8519/how-long-will-it-take-for-opencoin-to-distribute-the-50-billion-xrps

So gentlemen, there is no guarantee that Opencoin could not just saturate the market with shills and limiting the supply to honest participants. How can it be easier to just tell a user asking for giveaways that there are 10,000 people in front of you in the queue, and your best option is just to buy XRPs somewhere? And how much does it cost to tell your shills just to create hundreds of sockpuppets and play the trick of "moving money from left hand to right" and create the false appearance that price goes up due to the demand? OK, let me make it clear, I may sound like a crazy paranoid but I am not doubting the integrity of Ripple developers and Opencoin here, but trying to demonstrate how vulnerable a honest investor in XRP can possibly be in the worst case scenario under the kind of secretive approach they are taking. Especially consider that there is nothing stopping a malicious organization from cloning the Ripple network and create a XRP competitor which they can manipulate to a considerably high price without even being discovered. If that happens what would happen to the XRP's value is anybody's guess.

My thought is the merchants should just warn the customers that they will not deliver for bitcoins coming from addresses with unconfirmed transactions, this should be enough to prevent race attacks, for anything worth enough for a Finney attack, it's recommended to just wait for several confirmations.

Mining is exactly why Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. Mining provides a way for the investors/buyers to pay for the running of the network, and an incentive for the miners to further secure the payment network.

Besides, mining is how Bitcoin can prevent double-spending and remain decentralized-a probabilistic(rather than commander-and-lieutenant) solution to the Byzantine Generals problem.

I don't think Google pay Mike Hearn to work on Bitcoin, he moonlights on his own.

What is less known is that he was actually the first guy to build the Mac version of Satoshi client: http://heliacal.net/~solar/bitcoin/mac-build/Bitcoin-MacOSBuildInstructions.pdf

Also sprach Zarathustra.....

I agree with all of it, but multisig would somehow remian useful. Consider, for example, a platform like Silk Road where credit rating is quite important and buyers have to escrow their funds with the platform, since the identity of the platform operator is not known, there is always the risk that the operator will run away with the escrowed money. Now with the multisig any malicious buyer will be punished by the rating system, and the escrowing address can be used as proof, in this case a huamn escrower would not do better at judging the proof of delivery from the buyer as there will be none.

I don't see it being advertised a lot, neither is it given a lot of love(we still can't do it in the GUI),  but I definitely see a market for such  a feature, there are a lot of transactions for which both parties involved would not want to put the escrowed funds in the hands of a third-party, in fact they may not even want any third-party to be aware of the transaction. So it seems that multisig can at least solve such a problem for a lot of these people.

What do you think?

What's interesting is that Bitcoin somehow explores this problem further in the cryptographic direction, if multisig is widely implemented, people can conduct escrowed transactions without using a third-party, you can create an address for escrowing funds which can only be withdrawn if both sides of a transaction agree, I am sure if such technique is widely used, a lot of new interesting scenarios of human interactions will appear.

What about Japan? Fast network+lenient government regulation. HK also sounds good but shouldn't say it as if it's a country.

The OP talks about trademark, a further possibility could be patents, random speculation.

Thanks for the compliment.

I think there maybe sensible reason why Opencoin/Ripple developers are so hesitant when it comes to release the source code, as what I said in another post, they may be worried that it's easy for others to "clone" their network and outdo them(after all only trust is required), so they decide to withhold from releasing the source code until their network "matures".

I personally am not too worried about the fact that Opencoin gets to decide the allocation of XRPs, but by creating XRP, Ripple set a very bad precedent: that a random organization can somehow print its own money and rake in a few million bucks for something costs next to nothing to create. You can bet that all Ripple-clones/forks will follow suit. Whether the Ripple network model will prove to be useful remains to be seen, but buying and hoarding XRPs is most likely a very bad idea.

Hardly the same, a bitcoin is, after all, a proof to the investors/users of your commitment and effort made to secure the network, when people buy bitcoins, a large part of the money goes to reward the miners, so people have at least an incentive to buy bitcoins even if they don't want to speculate at all-they know the more they pay, the more reliable and usable a payment network will be available to them, and the more reliable the network, the more people want to use them.(theoretically of course) Overtime an earlier network could establish a huge advantage over the later ones. So a real cloned network would have to replicate all the infrastructures in place, or get Bitcoiners, whose interests are strongly vested in the network to switch, such an endeavour would be extremely costful and make no sense economically.


A Ripple network, on the other hand, takes very little to rebuild from scratch, a validator costs nearly nothing to someone like a botnet operator, and they have incentive to stay honest and gain trust because their own XRP-clone currency could thus gain value and make money for them.

The XRP creators choose to issue their money in the "printing press" mode, there is no reason why others can't follow suit.

The only coins that Satoshi arguably premined are those from the genesis block, but they are forever unspendable. Afterwards he released the code, and spread the news to as many places as possible, with hundreds of people got in contact with Bitcoin, Hal Finney for one mined several thousand. The only reason that it's Satoshi who mined 1M bitcoins, not someone else is we are all suckers who couldn't see the value of this thing, had anyone of the early adopter kept their miners running all day for half a year they would have been ridiculously rich now. Even if Satoshi had spent millions of dollars to get a Bitcoin ad running on Times Square 24 hours a day I doubt there would have been more than a few miners during the whole period. And Satoshi actually needed to keep his miner running because he must be ready for any new joiner of the network, there must be at least two nodes or it's not a network.

Compare that to Opencoin, did they ever give any chance for anyone to get hold of that 20% of XRPs? The fact that some Ripplers mentioned these two in the same breath shows just how twisted their minds are.

I wonder what's the second "real" transaction? Or more general, a list of very early transactions?