I'm not saying you're wrong. I can't possibly know that Jed never said what you say he said. However, I never heard him say it, nor have I heard anyone else mention that he said it. I have seen reporters describe Ripple that way, and it would be easy to connect it to Jed, especially when articles intersperse that description with quotes from him.

You made a very specific claim. I suspect that claim is false.

I can't find a single case where you and I discussed anything except for the "What if the government" thread, where you replied to me and I never replied to you -- mostly because I agreed with you. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136348.msg2405639#msg2405639

First, that's Chris, not Jed. Second, "second iteration of bitcoin" is a description. "Bitcoin 2.0" is a name. There's a huge difference. Coke can say it's "an improvement on Pepsi" but if it says it's "Pepsi 2", that's a problem.

And really that is a fair description. We started out with Bitcoin's design and source code. We looked at what we thought worked well and what we thought could be improved. That's how we built Ripple.

I'm not knocking on a coin for riding bitcoin's coat tail. I'm knocking a coin for deliberately attempting to create actual confusion in a way that's damaging to Bitcoin.

Right, but deliberately creating confusion that hurts Bitcoin and could cause people to lose money is a problem.

If you think I have 20 billion XRP, you're off by a factor of about 10,000.

I never heard Jed do that. If you have a credible source, I'll believe you. But I never heard him do that, nor anyone else claim he did that. I have seen articles that ask rhetorically if Ripple is "Bitcoin 2.0", presumably to suggest that Ripple might replace Bitcoin. But, so far as I know, nobody is making any attempt to intentionally confuse Bitcoin and Ripple so that people think Ripple has some connection to Bitcoin that it doesn't have.

As for opencoin.org being a "bitcoin group", I'm pretty sure they're not. The OpenCoin.org folks have no connection to Bitcoin that I know of and the group became more or less inactive in 2009. And, frankly, the possibility of confusion with that group was one of the downsides to choosing 'OpenCoin' as a company name. Not because there's anything wrong with them, just because you want a name to be as unique as possible so you can choose what people associated it with. That's why names like "Amazon", "eBay", and "Microsoft" are so good.

It really looks like you're trying to start an argument for no reason here.

What problems is Bitcoin facing?

Try that at the track and see how well it works.

You know what's scary? People who pre-ordered kncminer gear seem to have basically won the lottery. There was no particular reason to think kncminer was more likely to succeed than many of the others who have attempted to make ASIC miners, and many fail. It looks like kncminer will deliver on time, or very very close to that, and well over specifications. And yet, it's unlikely that many of those who pre-ordered will ever mine as many Bitcoins as they paid for their miners, after the cost of electricity is deducted.

It's simple economics. If mining is particularly profitable, then more people will mine. This will continue until mining is not particularly profitable.

100% agree.

That's one of the reasons federation may be important. In the future, your payments may be made possible by Ripple without you even knowing. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297287.msg3246899#msg3246899

If this is the issue I think it is, just type in the password and the button will work.

I agree with GoldenWings91. How much swap space and memory do you have? Make sure you're only compiling one file at a time. You can watch with 'top' as it compiles. See how many compilers it's starting and how big the RSS of the compiler process gets. Determine, for sure, whether it's virtual memory exhaustion or not.

Exactly. If you're in a car and there's a curve ahead, you don't scream "We're all gonna die!", you turn the wheel just before the curve.

One of the things that annoys me is when people complain that things are unsustainable. Almost everything we do is unsustainable, that's why we don't do the exact same thing for decades. Driving in a car in a straight line is unsustainable, but you do it until you get to the curve. Then you drive in another direction that is also unsustainable. The goal is not to find a path that's sustainable but to find the next change in direction to maintain progress.

Most of the disaster scenarios that I've thought about for Bitcoin seem possible but unlikely. But I'm absolutely confident that if we approached any of those disaster scenarios, the community would respond with a solution, just as it did when we had the chain split. Miners all want the system to succeed. Software maintainers all want the system to succeed. And if there's a few jerks who don't, it won't take long for everyone else to stop listening to them. If at any time the majority of stakeholders actually want Bitcoin to fail, then it probably should.

Pretty much every business, other than an essential utility, can decide that they no longer wish to do business with you. It can definitely be extremely inconvenient.

For now, I think so.

It depends what you're trying to do.

If you want to lend him up to $500 and trust him to pay you back, then Ripple is a great fit. He can also extend credit to you if you want to so you can both deal with other people flexibly. He can pay you back inside Ripple (say with balances from a gateway you trust). You always know who owes who how much. And you never need to pressure him to settle since you can spend the money he owes you (this, of course, assumes he holds balances you want or has trust lines that are useful to you). You can, of course, also settle in person for cash and adjust the Ripple accounting to keep it in sync.

If you just want to be able to pay each other money, then Ripple may or may not be useful. If you can easily exchange checks or use ACH transfers or hand cash in person, then Ripple probably doesn't help you very much. But if you each use different currencies or already find a use for holding funds at Ripple gateways, then Ripple makes those payments quick and cheap.

Payment systems may or may not be gateways, but essentially, yes. Imagine if PayPal and Western Union are both Ripple gateways. Now, a PayPal customer can make a payment to a Western Union customer through a mechanism like this:

1) The PayPal customer logs into their PayPal account and selects to make a payment.

2) The PayPal customer specifies the Western Union customer using something functionally equivalent to an email address.

3) PayPal talks to Western Union and gets the Ripple account and destination tag to use for the payment.

4) PayPal uses Ripple pathfinding to find out what the payment will cost and informs their customer.

5) The customer approves the transfer.

6) PayPal makes a Ripple payment to Western Union. PayPal decrements the balance on their customer.

7) Western Union sees the payment and credits their customer.

This allows payment systems to federate through Ripple. The payment system operators don't have to handle any cross-currency or cross-issuer issuers so long as there is sufficient liquidity through market makers in the Ripple network. The users don't have to know that the two payment systems used Ripple to make the payment.

This payment can be reversible or irreversible, depending on the agreement between the payment networks (which can be automatically negotiated at step 3). Payment systems can be payment systems themselves and/or they can accept balances from one or more gateways of their choice.

Now, you might wonder why PayPal and Western Union wouldn't just agree to do this without Ripple. And, for this example, they probably would. But if you imagine a number of payment systems using different currencies, you can see why this works better. Email used to work with ad hoc arrangements -- if you had AOL, you could use their Compuserve email gateway to email a Compuserve user. But nobody does it that way anymore, and for good reasons.

If this model takes off, Ripple's direct user base could consist mainly of gateways, payment systems, market makers, large merchants, and power users.

To fund development, to drive adoption of Ripple as a payment network, to do some good in the world, and, of course, we are a for profit company.

There's really almost no conflict. Satoshi didn't violate any regulations when he made Bitcoin, so far as I know. Yet he built a system that lets people do as they please.

You can look at the code. The secret is random. It's stored, encrypted, in your wallet. Your encrypted wallet can be stored locally in your browser or remotely in a blob vault.

As for why there is a need to have a centralized company that backs it, it's because adoption is absolutely not a sure thing. We've worked as hard was we can to design the system, develop the code, build relationships with other companies, and so on. There will come a time when Ripple no longer needs us. As people find the Ripple network useful, we hope they'll contribute the features they most need or want. We're having a developer conference in Las Vegas in about two weeks.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=293086.0

Right. To move an asset electronically that isn't an inherently electronic asset, you need to trust someone or something to hold that asset. This is why if you want to move dollars into or out of Bitcoins, you have to trust an exchange to hold the dollars for you. The main advantages of Ripple are that you can transfer balances without having to go to or through the issuer and everyone has access to the order books between assets with no forex middlemen. This allows people to hold the assets they choose while still being able to make payments across currencies and across issuers -- so you don't have to trust the same entities as the you want to do business with.

Not accounts, balances. Nobody can freeze your account, and the freeze feature (if it was implemented) would only freeze a single balance, not an entire account.

In any event, here's a repeat of my explanation in case you missed it:

The "freeze" ability hasn't been implemented due to lack of demand. The restrict ability is implemented, but no gateways (that I know of, anyway) currently use it. These options have to be enabled for an account prior to any assets being issued by that account. So if a gateway chooses to use either of these features, everyone will know it before they choose to use that gateway. We don't want to tell other people how they have to use Ripple. We want to enable people to do what they want to do. Of course, we do want everyone to know what they're getting into and we want the rules to be hard to change after the game has started.

Ripple is an irreversible payment system just like Bitcoin. There is no recourse if you regret sending funds or do so in error.

The issues for Ripple are much the same as Bitcoin. In much of the world, irreversible payment systems are already available and widely used.

Ripple may wind up being predominantly used between payment systems rather than between users directly. Ripple can provide the cross-currency and cross-issuer movement of funds without users having to interact with Ripple directly. This allows payment systems to make payments reversible between each other under whatever terms they find mutually agreeable. This also avoids the need for users to manage cryptographic credentials.