+1

If you do not like all the ads you can just turn off the signatures. It is much better now than a couple years ago, when people were allowed to have images in their signatures, and some people had massive signatures that took up a whole screen height. For the most part I just ignore signatures, but I am also one who has sold my signature space in the past.

Selling signature ads does not hurt anybody, it is a nice way for newbies to get a bit of bitcoin and get a feel for how it works. I myself doubt the effectiveness of signature ads, but I am not one to turn down earning money just for placing one line of code in my forum preferences.

@misterbigg: You targeting the anti-ripple ads in your post sends up red flags based on your very outspoken pro-ripple stance. It sounds like you are trying to silence your competition. That will not fly on this forum, where the admins have from the beginning been openly advocates of speech freedom. Even people who generally agree with you will turn against you if you start using dirty tactics.

If you do a search of the Meta section, I bet you can find a few times this question has been asked before.

As mentioned above, if you ban somebody they will just make a new account and start over again. But also, even if they are a scammer they can still contribute meaningful dialog to the discussions on the forum, the scammer tag just warns people not to trust them with money.

So have the button say "Trust this person's feedback" to make it clear what the button does.

Bitcoin is a Scam!

This is a great logical argument of astounding depth; everybody is convinced by you copious evidence, especially the bold text and the exclamation point, those totally won me over.

The XRP are a currency much like BTC is a currency. If somebody wanted you to pay them using XRP you could do that.

Yeah, I went to the trust page expecting there to be some sort of button "Trust this person", it took me a few times confusedly going back to people's trust pages and the trust setting page to finally figure out I could edit the list by typing in the box.

Hi, I am trying to figure out how this trust works, is there a simple way to add people to your trust list, or do you have to type each one in the box in the "trust settings" page?

Is it all bitcoin exchanges or just Gox specifically?

+1

Instead of writing a book you could make a website. That would be easier to keep up to date.

Yes. No.

Read how old these posts are!

This has been discussed before a few times.

The problem always boils down to: holding bitcoin does not provide any income, so there would be no way to make money with this. Potentially the fund could be actively trading bitcoins, but you would not need to have so many to make money doing that, and you have to worry about whether your active manager is actually better than the market.

I would say, if you have the connections to actually set up a financial instrument for holding bitcoins, go ahead and do it because there are plenty of people who would want to invest.

Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying? I said it affects fewer people than Cyprus, you said "not fewer", which implies "larger", so to me you are saying that this is larger than Cyprus?

But even if they are being stopped for cause, there are innocent people whose funds are now frozen. Should I be punished just because my neighbor does something bad?

You are trying to say that more people used Liberty Reserve than live in Cyprus? A country with over a million people and an economy of over 20 billion dollars?

If you have not heard the news yet, Liberty Reserve has been shut down http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22680297

This is bullish news for Bitcoins. Not only is there now one less competitor to bitcoins, but this shows one more time why a decentralized payment network is much more resilient than a centralized one. This also shows how aggressive governments can be, so it is even more important to have your money in a place you control, one which will not get shut down by police.

Is this as big as the Cyprus thing? No, because it affects fewer people, but it is just one more thing in a long line of acts which the government is doing which will ultimately push people into using Bitcoins.

Yesterday I filled up my van with gas (about 16 gallons) for the price of 0.5 btc.

The centralized aspect will become less of a problem in the future. The idea is that there will be many nodes supporting the network, and as OpenCoin gives/sells away their holdings of XRP they will have less and less power.

One thing that has not been mentioned is that bitcoin is much more anonymous than Ripple. Take a look at https://ripple.com/graph/#rGsLivkDjTZHFQ8oV2h81uTcbTpgjEaEY7, you can see all the activity of anybody on the network. Because of the way Ripple works, it is much harder to do things anonymously.

If you only trust the Bitstamp gateway then any BTC IOUs you receive will have actual BTC held at Bitstamp.

The ripple network is very transparent, check out https://ripple.com/graph/, if you put in a ripple address you can see who they trust and what they hold. For your own account, you can go to the "trust" page, and for each line of trust you have there is a bar with the balance for that trust pair.

In the Ripple system you own XRP just like you own BTC within the bitcoin system. Any other currencies on Ripple are just debt currencies, so a BTC or a USD on Ripple just means somebody owes you a BTC or USD, but any XRP in your account are actually yours.

That being said, BTC has been around longer and the market is much bigger (seems funny to say that, since Bitcoins are still so young), so it is more established. The superiority of bitcoins as a currency can be found by considering that XRP was initially created with 100 billion units, the founders still hold most of it and they can give it away anytime they want. The Ripple system is also set up so that the amounts of XRP needed to use the system can be lowered, indeed they have already lowered the account reserve minimum from like 300 to 100 XRP, which causes inflation by decreasing the demand for XRP.

Wow, they were giving away 40,000 XRP when the giveaway started, the amount given away has really gone down quite a bit. But 3000 XRP is still many more than you will need in a lifetime of using Ripple.