That's certainly possible. Gateways are, like all other businesses, required to follow the laws of the jurisdictions in which they operate and must respond to court orders issued by courts of competent jurisdiction. The greater includes the lesser -- in theory a government could order a gateway to stop redeeming entirely. Basically, if you operate in an jurisdiction, the controlling government can do any terrible thing to you that you might imagine.

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.

The ASIC arms race is making it harder and harder from some rich entity to corner the market. The price to corner the market keeps going up as there are more and more ASICs that are more and more powerful in the hands of more and more people.

It is true that mining will increase until mining isn't particularly profitable, thus discouraging casual mining. But there's no reason to expect there wouldn't be a number of groups mining seriously.

It's designed to operate as a full decentralized network. It is not all the way there yet. Open sourcing the server is one step. An infrastructure for managing validator lists without a central authority is the next big step.

If we shut down, the network will continue so long as people are interested in continuing it. If it solves real problems for real people, they'll keep it going. If not, what difference does it make? Avoiding regulation is not one of our goals. In fact, we're working very hard to figure out how everyone from individuals to financial institutions can use crypto-currencies while complying with existing regulations and working to prevent new regulations that stifle innovation.

Well, we can start the process by convincing a number of distinct organizations to run validators, publish lists of validators maintained using an open process, and so on. But I do agree that real decentralization will require people to choose to adopt Ripple and choose to participate. Basically, it's like the way Bitcoin became decentralized -- it took large numbers of different groups to run miners, participate in the development of the software, and form a robust community that can make decisions about the direction the network should go.

You can see how much outstanding credit they have and how much of ot they've used. You can also see how other people value the assets they issue. (This is the same way the unusually high price of BTC at Mt. Gox leads you to believe there's some reason people value their USD at less than face value.)

It's possible that in the future tools might allow you to evaluate whether to trust people based solely on their behavior inside the network. For example, say you see someone who issues an asset that's very liquid -- you can easily sell it. And say that allowing them to we you a dollar would save you ten cents on a transaction. You might elect to accept that risk. After a while, and after this trust line has produced some value for you, you might raise the trust to, say $5. It may be such that even if they default on the whole $5, you're still up overall because the trust line made payments cheaper for you.

But this future may never happen. I think it's likely that for the foreseeable future, you'll need reasons outside the network itself if you don't want to take unreasonable risks.

One reason is that this can be gamed. I can issue bitcoins and offer to trade $130 for them. I can then create a lot of accounts that also offer to trade $130 for them. This might make you think that it's a liquid asset. But once you agree to hold it, I can pull all those offers. Now in theory you could check the people who placed the offers and use heuristics to make sure they're legitimate. And certain types of transactions (such as those that pay a transfer fee to a gateway) can only be faked at a cost.

But for now, we suggest people only create pathways to businesses that they have a reason to believe will continue to redeem as they've agreed to.

You can only have a debt outstanding to someone who specifically choose to allow you to owe them money. If you're worried about this, don't extend any credit to individuals or ensure that there are provisions to cover those debts in the event of their death. Alternatively, extend a small enough amount of credit that the benefits of using and re-using that credit over and over outweigh the risk of the one-time loss should they default.

But this is one of the problems with community/social credit. It requires people to manage a fairly complex kind of risk. This is the main reason I don't think the world is ready for community/social credit yet. It will take sophisticated tools to sensibly manage that risk and perhaps also some social changes.

The client does need to communicate with one or more servers (as do servers, of course). Currently, only servers have a set of chosen validators.

It's still early in Ripple's evolution. You can build software that uses the protocol and connects to the network that has any combination of features and capabilities that you want. We're not quite sure how people are going to wind up using it. One possibility is that people will run "thin servers" and connect a browser-based client to their own server. Another possibility is that people will run "heavy clients" that have a list of validators and act more like servers do (though probably only as observers to the consensus process). Another possibility is that Ripple will be invisible and people will use it indirectly through things like federation. We've designed the protocol and the data structures to be flexible enough to support fairly light implementations that can still implement their own UNLs. The reference client isn't there yet. There's still a lot of work to do. It's still early.

We definitely wouldn't want to do that because that would make us more of a central authority than we ever want to be. But perhaps a way to have your wallet provider be able to recover your secret wouldn't be a bad idea. We could make it opt in. Ideally, we wouldn't want your wallet provider to be able to do it alone, but if there's something you have to give them for them to be able to recover, then if you lose that you're again cut off from your account.

Anyone else can set up a client and server now. The problem is that a trojaned client could steal your secret. A standalone client (or browser plug in) would be great to have. Anyone who wants to can implement one, of course. I know we have one in our plans, but I'm not sure what the timeline is. Again, this is another place where we agree. These are risks, and we'd prefer people did not have to take these risks so we're working to reduce or eliminate them.

If people have to trust us, that means we get the blame if something goes wrong and the risk that we might betray that trust is a disincentive to use the system. If people don't have to trust us, then we don't have to do anything or take any risk. We definitely do not want people to have to trust us.

Yes. It would be a little hard right now because the infrastructure to make it easy to do that isn't complete yet. Effectively, the community would probably just have to agree on someone to replace us. Until someone else could execute a full decentralization plan.

But we're hard at work on the transition to greater decentralization. We have no wish to control or operate the Ripple network. We have no desire to own the network or the protocol. The reason it's important that we get this right is that we want it to be as impossible for some other entity to become a central authority controlling the network. When we fully let go, we need to make sure nobody else can grab on.

Not really. You're just trusting validators not to collude against you. When you extend a trust line, you are trusting someone to hold money for you or owe you money.

The business model requires XRP to appreciate. Nobody would disagree that what we're trying to do is high risk. Success is definitely not guaranteed.

XRP is unique though. It's the only currency that can flow between any two parties with no trust path needed. It's the only currency in Ripple that has no counter-party. While other currencies can have transfer fees imposed on them by their issuers, XRP never has any transfer fee other than the transaction fee. We expect that people will make assets liquid on Ripple by making them liquid to and from XRP, and we expect that people who don't know what asset they'll need will tend to hold XRP.

What happens if everyone chooses a completely different set of rules for what constitutes a valid Bitcoin block? Yes, people have to agree to work together for any system to function.

But no central authority is needed to make this happen. The rules for what constitutes a valid Bitcoin block today are de facto decided by Gavin. But he's not a central authority because nobody has to listen to him. People do because they know that cooperation is needed for the system to work and he is doing a good job. He can't sustain his position unless he is responsive to the community. If he were to make some absurd decision, few would listen to him and that would be the end. Yes, lots of people update their code to whatever release he publishes but only because they trust him and can withdraw that trust at any time.

Any number of organizations can publish lists of validators that they recommend. These lists can be algorithmically combined. If someone publishes a list that is nonsensical, you can just stop following them.

I agree. Ripple was designed to be decentralized and is not really all the way there yet.

I'm making a genuine attempt to discuss issues with you honestly. If you aren't going to do the same, I'll stop wasting my time. The issue was administrative control and decentralization. You raised a criticism that Ripple cannot be decentralized which I rebutted it by pointing out that it's the norm that some entity holds administrative control over a system until it's decentralized. You are welcome to defend your claim or acknowledge that it's incorrect. Then you are welcome to move onto something else. But you are *not* welcome to change the subject when your claims are refuted and ignore the fact that they were refuted.

OpenCoin holds a majority of validators right now. I'm sure Satoshi made any number of changes to Bitcoin before it was open source. We genuinely don't want this power because others legitimately perceive it as a risk, and changing this is one of our priorities now. We designed the system to be decentralized and are working to get it there.

So will Ripple. Nodes you connect to don't effect the data you see. You just need to be on the same ledger. I think our consensus scheme has a lot of advantages over Bitcoin's proof of work scheme, but one thing that is a disadvantage is that you need to maintain (or trust some other people to maintain on your behalf) lists of validators that you are willing to trust not to collude against you. We've been working on ways to make this as painless and secure as possible without compromising decentralization. It is a challenge.

Tell me how I can choose the Bitcoin genesis block, mining algorithm, or reward schedule. These systems are built under some entity's control and then that entity releases it into the wild such that it can never be imprisoned again.

They must be somewhat similar, that's true. But Bitcoin only works if everyone has the same blockchain and the same rules to decide what constitutes a valid block, but since nobody gets to unilaterally decide what the blockchain is or force a blockchain that violates the rules on others, it's still decentralized. It is absolutely true that for X to use the system to pay Y, X and Y must be on the same ledger. But no entity gets to decide what the ledger is and the ledger can only transition based on defined rules that nobody can unilaterally change.

Whether a system is decentralized or not is a question of how its administrative functions work. By "administrative functions", I mean things that most people cannot do but that some entities have a special power to do. If it's "decentralized" then no single entity or small group of people can unilaterally seize administrative power. Bitcoin is decentralized in this way because it basically has no administrative functions other than changing the rules, and no single entity can change the rules. The community has to agree to change the rules for that to happen. Ripple was designed to be decentralized in this sense, but isn't quite yet because a single entity controls all the validators most people trust. We absolutely agree that we don't want things to stay that way. Once we get distributed validators, then it will be essentially impossible to provide any kind of administrative control without getting a large number of entities to agree.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Sorry to hear about that. Our wallet scheme has been improved significantly since then, but it is still a bit non-intuitive. One thing I should emphasize -- the client strongly urges you to write down your account secret. (It's a string the client generates that starts with an "s".) So long as you have that secret (and nobody else does), your funds are safe. You can always create a new wallet with the same secret.

Also, if you have any suggestions for better giveaways, we'd love to hear them.

No, but there are other people who have that idea. Watch for announcements.

Haha.

It's pretty easy, you just put "quote" before the quote (in square brackets) and "/quote" after it, also in square brackets.

That would be up to the community to decide. It's certainly possible that without us to back it, Ripple would wither and die. That's probably true right now. But that also will change over time as more and more people have a vested interest in seeing Ripple succeed because it solves problems for them. If Ripple doesn't solve real world problems that real people have, it doesn't much matter if it goes away. If it does, then those people will have an incentive to sustain it.

That won't do anything. The software is out there. Right now, we do run all the validators that people use, but if we disappeared, others would do so. One of our top priorities now is to distribute the set of validators and set up an infrastructure to make that self-regulating and decentralized.

Every ledger is signed by every validator every few seconds. Every ledger includes a tree that justifies any changes in the main portion of the ledger. If someone's XRP balance increases, there must be a metadata entry justifying that change, or everyone in the world has proof Ripple has, through bug, subterfuge, or glitch, violated the rules.

Every ledger has two halves, a state half and a change half. Any changes to the state half (other than trivial changes to indexing and so on) must be justified by a signed transaction in the change half. If not, everyone will have proof that Ripple violated its invariants somehow. Any change that "disadvantages" someone must be justified by a transaction they signed. Any increase in XRP must be justified by a matching decrease (there is no way to create additional XRP beyond what exists in the genesis ledger). And so on.

We had to design the system so that people could trust it even after it was decentralized. We have no secrets. The source code is available. If we got anything wrong, we'll do our best to fix it.

Speaking for myself personally, I think community/personal credit may be Ripple's killer app over the long term. But we don't quite understand how to manage it yet. Hopefully the community will help us figure out the best way to do this.

That is definitely planned. We're working on a decentralized ID verification scheme.

No. Ripple has many other benefits, such as direct access to market makers for cross-currency payments and the ability to shift balances without having to go to or through the issuer.

We'd love for people to do those things! Anyone can introduce arbitrary assets onto the Ripple network and everybody gets to choose which assets they consider valuable. That's what it's for.

I'm not sure what you're asking. If you mean the Ripple protocol, nobody. If you mean the Ripple network, all the participants own their respective devices. We have no desire to control or own the protocol or the network.

That's what Ripple does. Anyone can issue an asset. Anyone can agree to accept any asset they want. The whole point of Ripple is to make payments work *without* any transitive trust.

Let's say you have a bank and I have a bank. You trust your bank to hold you money. I trust my bank to hold my money. If I want to pay you $50, I write you a check for $50. You don't trust me or my bank, but because that check allows your bank to owe you $50 more, you consider me to have paid you $50. You don't trust anyone but your bank. I don't trust anyone but mine. In the middle, either people who trust both banks, someone who is willing to trade dollars for XRP, or some other path makes the payment work. That's Ripple's big idea.

One big advantage is that it gives people currency choice. If Ripple takes over the world, you can get paid in local currency and receive dollars. When you buy groceries, you can spend dollars and the grocer receives local currency. That means you don't hold local currency, so your government can't inflate it our from under you. Don't like dollars? Hold gold. Like Bitcoins? Hold them.

No, you can only lose out if someone you choose to trust defaults on you for an amount equal to or less than the amount you trusted them to hold on your behalf. Payment paths only exist instantaneously while a payment is made. After that, there are only balances on trust lines that people have specifically chosen to create.

We're not claiming Ripple is "more secure" than conventional payment systems.

We have yet to see a case where someone had a balance decrease when they didn't either place an offer or sign a transaction to authorize that decrease. If that ever happened, everyone would know it because balances are public and transactions are public. I definitely agree that protecting the private keys used to sign transactions is a huge issue for any crypto-currency system. We've been working on improving the way we do that, but I agree that there's lots more work to be done. This is a huge issue for both Bitcoin, Ripple, and pretty much any other decentralized crypo-currency system that gives people access to irreversible payments.