We understand this risk well. That's why we want to decentralize the system as quickly as we can.

There's no 50 billion going to employees or developers. I'm not sure where you got that from.

I completely share your feeling, actually. We've watched a long list of people who have brought no innovations to the table declare that Bitcoin is fundamentally broken somehow and that their alt coin is the way to fix it. (It's deflationary, that means it's broken. CPUs can't mine, that means it's broken. It doesn't force people to give money to open source software that means it's broken. It's unfair. It needs company. Etcetera, ad nauseum.)

Unfortunately, people have invested in these alt coins, causing jumps in price that have caused others to similarly invest. It's all obviously got to implode because none of these currencies had any realistic chance at being used as a means of exchange which is the only thing that can sustain them.

What I object to is people making up nonsensical claims about Bitcoin to try to make a personal profit without contributing any innovation or taking any risk whatsoever. I don't begrudge the Bitcoin early adopters because they contributed innovation and took risk.

(And if you search back, you will find that I took this exact same position long before I was associated with Ripple.)

Please don't. The electricity used will cost way more than the coins you could mine.

Let's say the network is busy with transactions. Say it's so busy that there isn't room to accommodate every transaction that a person might want to do. Now, say you need to do a very important transaction while most of those transactions are relatively unimportant. You can simply pay a larger transaction fee and that gives miners an incentive to include your transaction rather than the less important ones.

Essentially, because transaction slots and bandwidth to relay transactions are scarce resources at times, some means of rationing them is needed. When those resources are not scarce, transactions can be included with no fees.

But also, it's to support the miners when the block reward drops. Miners are *required* to secure the blockchain. This is how Bitcoin solves the double spend problem. If there weren't sufficient mining activity, that would be a serious security problem.

I just finished listening to the show. Awesome job!

The only way we know of to back currencies with something without counterparty risk is for you to have physical possession of something valuable. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of my life's savings being stuffed in my mattress.

But also, backing a currency is a mediocre solution to a problem Bitcoin doesn't have. Why do you want a backed currency?

It's not because it increases the value of the currency. Who cares? If it's worth less, we'll just use more of it. If it's worth more, we just use less of it.

We want a currency to be backed because that limits the amount that can be created. But it does so imperfectly because fractional reserves can be kept and, for backing like gold or silver, more of the backing item can be discovered.

Bitcoin doesn't have this problem. Its rate of production is almost perfectly predictable. So what beneficial purpose would backing it serve? (And, of course, it would add risk that, for example, whoever backed it might go out of business.)

Either his accomplices/clones/puppets act substantially the same as non-accomplices or they don't.

If the accomplices act substantially the same as non-accomplices, then it doesn't matter. The supply and demand will be the same. The currency will still be just as useful as either a means of exchange or a store of value.

If his accomplices act substantially different from the way non-accomplices would act, then you have a way to tell -- the supply and demand will be what would be consistent with accomplices rather than what would be consistent with non-accomplices.

That's not to say it doesn't matter if someone cheats, lies or steals. That's definitely bad and probably criminal. It's inexcusable and we would probably hope that such a person is punished. But it's not going to effect the usefulness of the currency, assuming the supply and demand are the same. (Although, of course, it might be useless for other reasons.)

If the concern is that someone might hoard large amounts of currency and dump them on the market as some sort of secret plan to make lots of money, that has nothing to do with the initial distribution. Someone could buy up a currency to do that. Once you have something, how you can make the most money from it is independent of how you go it. (And these schemes never work anyway.)

Opencoin does not compensate employees or Ripple developers with XRP.

I think his point would be that Bitcoin in 2140 won't be much different from a 100% pre-mined coin after the coins have become reasonably distributed due to sales, giveaways, or whatever. While true, this model probably wouldn't work well for Bitcoin  -- the block reward was needed to encourage mining which is needed to secure the block chain. And block rewards probably still are needed. By 2140, either Bitcoin will have already died off or a reward won't be needed to encourage mining anymore. Boostrapping Bitcoin adoption by people mining for transaction fees just doesn't seem doable.

Nice catch. I'll check to make sure it won't break anything and see if it can be changed to be consistent with all the other times. The "ledger" command also reports close times like "2013-Mar-08 21:16:10", which is a bit annoying (I don't even know if that's local time or UTC, *sigh*). We wanted the JSON format to be mostly human comprehensible, but times get ugly because we don't always know that something is a time when it's being parsed. (And the JSON output and input formats are supposed to be compatible.)

"We're all going to die because our car is heading straight for a cliff ten miles ahead."

Umm, no. We'll probably turn the wheel sometime between then and now.

Community credit (borrowing money from strangers). Social credit (borrowing money from friends). Self-executing contracts. Holding preferred currencies as stores of value and switching to preferred currencies for exchange as needed. Providing liquidity for a profit. And who knows what else.

To phrase this more artfully, if you find that the circumstances of the sale make it the buyer's loss if the package is lost or stolen in shipment, that just demonstrates that Coinabul's negligent failure to secure effective insurance harmed the buyer, a harm that Coinabul would be responsible for. If a merchant charges a customer for insurance, just as if a merchant charges a customer for anything else, it's the merchant's responsibility to ensure the thing sold is adequate for the purpose intended.

This assumes that the failure to secure appropriate insurance was negligent on Coinabul's part. The posts above suggest that, but it's not absolutely clear.

Even assuming the failure wasn't negligent, it is unthinkable to me that Coinabul wouldn't make good on the loss. Here we have a customer who didn't knowingly intend to incur any risk -- he chose to pay for the insurance that Coinabul offered. What business wants to make it their policy that even if the customer pays for the delivery insurance that that business specifically offers, they are still assuming the risk that the package may get lost or damaged in shipment and the insurance company may deny a claim for a reason that everyone involved agrees is unacceptable? (That is, not a risk the customer or business meant to assume.)

Short term: Yes, exactly. Ripple is perfect for this.

Long term: People may use Ripple to do things completely different from what they currently do with Bitcoins and with payment systems.

Yeah. Sorry about that. We considered changing it to seconds since the UNIX Epoch or text times, but that would make things awkward when we're reading JSON. (We'd have to know if an integer was a time in order to know whether to apply the offset.)

The documentation has been fixed.

This I don't understand. If the insurance is to benefit you, that must mean that you are liable if the package is lost. But you're saying you're not. These two positions are inconsistent. Unless you are saying that if the customer didn't pay for insurance but you paid for insurance, and the package is lost and the insurance company pays up, you might just keep the insurance money and tell the customer they're out of luck? I sure hope that's not what you're saying.

Ripple network times are seconds since 1/1/2000, 00:00:00 UTC.

Contacts are stored in your wallet. Are you using the default wallet provider?

Your account has 40,000 XRP in it. I just checked. We've had a few outages today and may still have some issues carried over to tomorrow. Deploying the new pathfinding and improved cross-currency payments wasn't as painless as we had hoped.

We had a few outages today, planned and unplanned. We rolled out a major upgrade to the pathfinding logic and cross-currency transaction support. We hope (fingers crossed) it's all stable now.