There will be more giveaways shortly. But you can also post your address somewhere and someone will usually fund it. You can also buy XRP at Bitstamp, bitmit, xrptrader, snowcoin, and a few other places.

Do you have any cite to an official source that says that? If they are planning to do that, having proof would be tremendously helpful to us. I think by "Ripples" they just mean your MLM downline or "team". I believe the names are just an unfortunate coincidence.

There are no invite codes. People are confusing Ripple with RippLn, some kind of MLM thing.
http://www.glancingweb.com/1894/underneath-the-slimy-ripples-of-rippln

Our lawyers are looking at defending our trademark.

There are lots of companies behind Bitcoin. Mt Gox, for example, has a huge incentive to see Bitcoin adoption grow.

What?!

Grossly misstating someone's position isn't the best way to build your own credibility.

We're not altruistic and never said we were. We're just willing to take a greater risk to achieve a greater result. Developing an open source, decentralized payment system is a greater risk than developing a centralized one, but the potential rewards are much greater as well. We're going after the bigger prize. I hope that if we do fail, it will be because someone else did what we did even better.

Surely you don't think a closed source, centralized network would accomplish that objective best? Do you think Bitcoins would be worth more today had Satoshi adopted that approach?

There are fixed overheads involved in processing a transaction. A small transaction has almost the same overhead as a large transaction. Thus it often makes sense to give a better rate on larger transactions. This is especially true for traders who themselves buy in bulk to get lower fees up the chain. If you do a big sale, that may be enough for you to do a large purchase and book a profit immediately. If not, you may have to sit on the currency you got paid until you can justify a trade yourself, and that means you take more risk.

A pathway is permission for someone else to hold money for you (or owe you money, which is the same thing). Your account is yours. You get to decide who holds your money. If someone wants to send, say, 1 Bitcoin to your account, someone has to hold that Bitcoin for you and you must approve them. A Bitcoin pathway to Bitstamp allows Bitstamp to hold Bitcoins for you. This will allow people to pay you in Bitcoins by making Bitstamp owe you Bitcoins.

It's somewhat akin to opening a bank account. If I want to give you $50 through the conventional banking system, I transfer $50 from my bank account to your bank account. You consider me to have paid you $50 because I made your bank owe you $50 more. If you want a physical $50 bill, you go to your bank and withdraw it. But I can't just give the $50 to anyone to hold for you, you have to first choose to trust someone. Creating a pathway is somewhat akin to opening a bank account.

Here's a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M16ZatXbmLg

There's really no substantive difference between these views. It's just a matter of what time horizon you look at and how you predict the future given limited information. Will people use XRP as a currency just because they can? Will people avoid holding XRP because they know OpenCoin can release lots of it and crash the market? Or will they expect that it's unlikely that will happen? It isn't a question of design or intention but more one of predicting what cannot be predicted.

If Ripple becomes popular, the price of XRP is fairly stable, and there's little perceived risk of a sudden change in price, people will probably use XRP as a currency. It can be held in Ripple with no counter-party risk, and under those conditions could be useful as a "bridging" currency -- because there's only one XRP, paths to and from XRP could be the best way to make a gateway's balances liquid. But those are a lot of if's. There are people who think that will never happen and people who think it's inevitable. If you think it's inevitable, then XRP is designed to be a currency. If you think it will never happen, then XRP is not designed to be a currency.

That really doesn't make any sense. If we were going to keep it closed, we would have just said so from the beginning. We could have required people to sign a contract to get the server code and used certificates to authenticate connections. We could have saved a lot of the design hassle of eliminating the requirement that no central authorities be needed. We chose not to do this because we honestly believe that's a losing strategy. Satoshi could have done the same thing with Bitcoin and sold "mining contracts" if he wanted to. But would Bitcoin be where it is today if he had chosen that route?

In what world though, in a business that relies on people to trust that the rules won't change on the whim of a single party, would any sane person start out a new system with such a huge change in the fundamental rules on the whim of a single party?

You can change the storage to local. You can save your wallet in a file and load it from a file.

It used to be that 300 XRP was the practical minimum to open an account, create a pathway so your account could hold BTC, and then trade BTC for XRP. So with 300 XRP, you could buy all the XRP you wanted. The reserve levels lowered recently, so 100 XRP will do now.

You can buy XRP from Bitstamp, bitmit, xrptrader, and a few other places.

No, that would be an idiot who would miss out on every opportunity that wasn't safe. Nobody had any idea how Facebook would make any money. Nobody had any idea how Twitter would make any money. I'm going to go out on a limb here and speculate that you've never talked to an actual VC person. If you have, they were crappy. We're talking about the people who are looking for the next PayPal because they *built* PayPal.

We're swinging for the fences. A long shot. A possible home run but also possibly a strike out. We're trying to change the world. Really.

I know you'll find this hard to believe, but I met with a lot of our investors. They're genuinely motivated at least as much by the prospect of disruption for good as they are by the prospect of making money.

https://ripple.com/client

There's a "create a wallet" link at the bottom.

Weird. Well then I have no explanation for what happened. Wormhole activity perhaps?

Wow. So somehow your mobile browser was saving your wallet without you actually doing anything, overwriting your changes.

The only way I know of that this can happen is if you save your wallet on one machine while it's open on another. If you do that, the last save wins and previous changes are lost. I haven't heard reports of that happening any other way.

Are you trying to leave more for everyone else or do you just prefer to wait for something more likely to fail?

They don't. But nothing stops the average Joe from buying specialized hardware.

No. Small farms can use ASICs too.

If there's a better/faster crypto-currency, then Bitcoin deserves to lose to it. However, ASIC-based mining is a strength, not a weakness.

I haven't done the math, but that seems reasonable.

I disagree with your for two related reasons:

1) Crypto-currencies that are most efficiently mined with ASICs are actually more secure because general purpose computing equipment can't be re-tasked to attack the currency. Once Bitcoin is mined with ASICs, retasking a botnet to attack Bitcoin will be hopeless.

2) Crypto-currencies that are most efficiently mined with ASICs can only be attacked by people who have a significant investment in equipment whose value is directly determined by the value of the currency. Those who can mine Bitcoins efficiently will be those who have invested heavily in Bitcoin itself and will have the most incentive to preserve its value.

There are a number of possible attacks on Bitcoin based on having lots of mining power, but the fact that it can be heavily accelerated by ASICs actually *increases* the resistance to them.

Don't be ridiculous. If I admit I'm capable of hitting my son in the head with a hammer, does that mean I've "reserved the right" to hit my son in the head with a hammer?

Of course not. Think about it -- for what possible reason would you want to slow down typing speed? In fact, it was created to speed up typing speed by keeping the hammers on old typewriters from hitting each other when you typed quickly. By pure luck, that also distributed the load over your fingers and avoids having to use the same finger twice in a row to hit different keys.

The only studies that showed Dvorak was better were done by ... wait for it ... Dvorak himself. (Or done by others but rigged by Dvorak.)

http://www.jaysage.org/QWERTY.htm