Before you do anything else, search all your drives for any 'wallet.dat' files. Save copies of every one you find.

(Fixed: Sorry for the typo.)

That was probably Ryan Fugger's original ripple system. The new Ripple system takes a lot from the original Ripple but also takes a lot of ideas from Bitcoin.

Fiat currencies only exist as either physical currency or IOUs (arguably, with exceptions such as MintChip). When someone says "I have $1,000", they mean either that they have dollar bills totaling $1,000 or, more likely in the modern world, that a bank owes them $1,000. If I pay you $100 without delivering physical dollar bills to you (whether by check, PayPal, wire transfer, Western Union, or Ripple), what I've actually done is switched from someone owing me $100 to someone owing you $100 (someone you have specifically chosen to use for this purpose). Modern electronic finance systems handle fiat currencies as IOUs. We don't have to think of them this way because it's behind the scenes.

It's as if we explained paying $100 for something with PayPal this way: You give your credit card issuer a $100 IOU, promising to pay them back later (outside the PayPal system). They then give a $100 IOU to PayPal. PayPal then gives a $100 IOU to the seller. The seller gives this IOU to their bank and now their bank owes them $100. They can withdraw this money from their bank by showing up at a branch (again, outside the PayPal system). So you can think of PayPal working by moving IOUs around. You don't have to think of it this way, but it's sometimes helpful. The net result is that the buyer owes his credit card issuer $100, the seller's bank owes them $100, and the seller considers the buyer to have paid them $100.

Ripple got its name because of the way these IOUs "ripple" through the system.

Grossly oversimplified: To perform a transaction, you announce it. Assuming there's no reason the transaction can't apply, every honest node (that is applying transactions) applies it. (If there's some reason the transaction might not apply, then we don't care what happens to it. But there is a mechanism to prevent divergence, of course.) Now, none of those nodes can accept the conflicting transaction because the node cannot construct a valid acknowledgement of a transaction that conflicts with a transaction they've already acknowledged. (Yes, the devil is in the details. I said this was grossly oversimplfied.)

Ripple payments can be thought of as exchanges of IOUs. For example, say I owe you $100, Jack owes me $50, and you need to pay Jack $50. With a ripple payment, you can pay Jack $50 through me and the result is that instead of me owing you $100, I now owe you $50. Jack considers you to have paid him $50 because you made him owe me $50 less (which is just as good). This one transaction accomplishes the payment.

The sender loses the $50 he sent, the receiver gains the $50 he receives, and all intermediary parties are either neutral to the transaction or benefit from it.

There is no growth to the fee because there is only one transaction and each point it ripples through benefits the parties, or at least they are neutral to it. Otherwise, they wouldn't (or at least, shouldn't) have permitted it.

That didn't come out quite right. Basically, we chose a model (like Bitcoin's) where transactions are processed against a public state database and can be validated by anyone. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

It doesn't use open transactions. The big downside to open transactions is that in order to perform a transaction, each issuer must actively participate in that transaction. Our implementation is quasi-proprietary at the moment. But the documentation and implementation will be made public.

They're lost forever, a gift to everyone who holds Bitcoins.

I was addressing *only* the issue of a run on a bank, not a bankruptcy. Runs are a solved problem, bad loans are not.

That's not up to me. All I can suggest is that you send an email and include some information about why we'd want you to beta test.

You're ready to sell the laptop. That was what was supposed to happen. The person who buys it can install whatever OS they want on it.

If people are going to use a social credit model, then social expectations and customs will have to evolve that we don't currently have. Personally, I think that's one of the best things about Ripple, but it works well without it. Short term, I think payments, particularly cross-currency, will be the bigger use case. But I truly believe that social credit is a long-term killer app in the crypto-currency world.

Say I extend you $50 in credit. If you use that credit up, you no longer have access to my credit network but I still have access to yours. And any time I use your credit network, that $50 balance will decrease. So long as at least one of us transacts regularly and the other has a reasonable network of connections, the balance will fluctuate. So unless someone abandons the Ripple network entirely, abandons their account, or abandons the currency, there should be no urge to settle small balances. You can just set their credit limit to zero and you will prohibit transactions that increase the balance and favor those that decrease it.

I agree. The ideal organization to hold your funds would either be a regulated financial institution that is insured by a government or a private organization with other assets that provides a provable 100% reserve that is insured by a private insurance company. Otherwise, you don't want to use dollars as a store of value. Arguably, you don't want to anyway because of inflation. For transactions, it doesn't matter so much because the window in which you are vulnerable is so small, and even a risk of default much higher than would actually arise, say .5%, is tolerable. (People pay 2% to take credit cards.)

I agree. That's why I say "much like".

Functionally, there is little difference between an IOU from a reputable institution and money. If you have $100 in your bank account, what you have is a $100 IOU from a bank. That's how people have dollars.

But I agree, the existence of counter-party risk will be a disadvantage that national currencies will always have over crypto-currencies like Bitcoin. Ripple doesn't change that. We're trying to remove some of the other disadvantages, and add a few new capabilities as well.

You can issue credit only to reliable financial institutions with which you have a "withdraw on demand" agreement. Your Ripple balance then becomes the equivalent of a bank account balance.

I think that over the long term, this will be what makes Ripple awesome. But it does require people to evaluate risk more rationally and not be so risk averse. I may be fighting human nature here. Theoretically, a rational business person should be equally happy taking credit cards at 2% or having 1 in 50 of their customers defaulting. But the former seems much more acceptable than the latter.

The core of Ripple is somewhat analogous to a bank account. When you have dollars, or any other normal currency, someone owes them to you. If you say "I have $5,000 in the bank", what you mean is that your bank owes you $5,000. Now, imagine if instead of having a regular bank account, you had something more analogous to a Bitcoin transaction output, and the bank agreed to pay the money to any customer of theirs that could prove they owned that transaction output. Now, you can transact in dollars just like you do in Bitcoins. You can send that balance to someone, split it up, join it, whatever. And that output has value because any customer of that bank can redeem it for cash.

There's a lot more, but that's the basic answer to what sense it makes -- it lets people transact in national currencies much like they currently transact in Bitcoins. One key difference, however, is that someone has to hold the actual currency and you have to decide who you will trust to do that.

Who said anything about a letter? I'm summarizing your position in the thread about Patrick and contrasting it with your position here.

You're not very good at bullying. It really makes very, very little difference to me whether you read my posts or not.

If you think funding research to put it in the public domain make sense, you are absolutely welcome to do it. If you're spending your own money, it's much more likely you'll get the cost/benefit analysis right. Perhaps you are right, perhaps I am getting it wrong. The beauty of a free market is that everyone gets to do their own such analysis.

Apparently, she only believes that others should be held to the letter of their agreements. When it's *her* agreement, and people *she* relied on don't do what she relied on them to do, her investors have to eat it.

The funny thing is, if not for her prior positions on Patrick, I'd likely agree with her on this issue.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I honestly can't figure out what you're trying to say. It seems there are only four possibilities:

1) Investors get nothing.

2) You make a payment to investors from your own pocket.

3) You pursue going through Giga's claim process and pass any funds you reclaim to investors.

4) You pursue some other source of recovery, such as suing GLBSE or negotiating with Giga, and pass any funds (perhaps less expenses) you reclaim to investors.

I think your comments rule out 1 and 3, but I'm not quite sure. You seem to be hinting at something with "This however has no bearing on the investors' rights", but I can't figure out what. Are you deliberately trying to be vague and evasive or am I missing something?

It doesn't answer the $64,000 question: Are you attempting to go through Giga's process to recover some of your investors' funds? If not, why not? I'm not implying that you don't have good reasons, just that you haven't made clear what they are.