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Nobody ever thinks hyperinflation will happen. But it does. History has shown it, even to formerly powerful currency it can hyper inflate to zero value.
The US dollar is on that path and it will be very hard to avoid it, they keep printing 85billion more of them every single month, so far. Forget the taper it will never happen. Only more and more printing. oops sorry Quantitative Easing.
Strategically other countries are choosing to abandon it, why base your economy on something another country can inflate at will.
Gold and Silver priced in dollars will be meaningless but you will need a lot less of them to buy property, stocks and shares or anything else of real value.
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The issue with btc is that the price is volatile, thus the utility of btc must surpass the costs associated with hedging against volatility
There are a limited number of applications were the anonymity and cross border functionality make use of btc a net positive, buying coffee, buying gas, grocery shopping or paying your rent is not among them.
gambling, remittances, bypassing intl wire and exchange fees, investment in the thing, buying herb online, avoiding merchant tx fees and not waiting a couple weeks to get your money from visa/mc
As an inflationary hedge it has a limited audience.
+1 I like to add donations though. I notice that I am much quicker donating to people thanks to btc. Donating with paypal is less fun and if I do it I pay less. Ie: I donate much more easily higher value with bitcoin. When I donate in bitcoin I know people will remember how many btc I gave, and likely in a few years when btc is up, my donation to them will go up in value in their mind. It's like donating a valuable stock, or precious metals, something you think will go up in value considerably, much cooler to do then donating fiat that will go down in value. Also by donating btc I am actually building the value of my remaining btc because more people have btc and start valuing it. I think donations make a chance to become the killer app of bitcoin. RationalSpeculator I like the cut of your jib  In response to other comments there is no point comparing bitcoins to things like paypal or whatever, bitcoins is like gold |
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Nice to see some steps in the right direction with Open Sourcing and with the name change.
However
Despite that though I still have an instinctive aversion to the concept of chains of trust and passing around debts. Bitcoins are something I get, it is sound money. Ripple is something that I just don't get the idea is confusing and even if the ripple devs have good intentions, I can't get past feeling that the idea can be used for nefarious aims.
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The 100 billion XRP cap is built into the protocol, there is no way to change without forking the ledger or convincing all the gateways. Your XRP funds are secure in the decentralized ledger (just save protect your secret key like you would protect your bitcoin wallet), the authorities would have to close down every gateway all over the world until there is no place left to buy and sell XRP. Ripple was inspired by the very same aspects we like about bitcoin (except mining, which obviously hasn't gone over well with miners). Even the ledger consensus process is borrowed from the way bitcoin transactions are broadcast among the nodes.
decentralised ledger? I understood ripple uses a single global ledger. Yes, a single global decentralized ledger. Just like the bitcoin blockchain - there's only one (unless you count forks), its global, and its decentralized. which makes me wonder how come its transactions are so much quicker.. ? |
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The 100 billion XRP cap is built into the protocol, there is no way to change without forking the ledger or convincing all the gateways. Your XRP funds are secure in the decentralized ledger (just save protect your secret key like you would protect your bitcoin wallet), the authorities would have to close down every gateway all over the world until there is no place left to buy and sell XRP. Ripple was inspired by the very same aspects we like about bitcoin (except mining, which obviously hasn't gone over well with miners). Even the ledger consensus process is borrowed from the way bitcoin transactions are broadcast among the nodes.
decentralised ledger? I understood ripple uses a single global ledger  edit. Thanks for the conversation, I'm learning things about ripple i didn't know. |
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Why I would go to a gateway,
to give them my money,
my dirty fiat money,
for them to change to ripples,
to send around the network,
trusting all the network,
to send along some bitcoins,
or promise of some bitcoins,
to redeem against the gateway,
the one that has my money,
(and sent around those ripples)
in order for the gateway,
to give me lovely bitcoins
when I could get my bitcoins
(Satoshi's lovely bitcoins)
directly from the gateway
for my dirty fiat money -
why would I?
I wouldn't  To be honest the very title of this thread gives a big clue of its trolling intent. The way I see it, with Ripples you have to have a heck of a lot of trust that people will do the right thing. With bitcoin, you don't need to, the network takes care of all that, its built in. |
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Bitcoin - no inflation, no central point of control, no chargebacks, enables confirmed transactions with no trust.
Ripple - central points of failure, more ripples and xrp could be issued by central issuer, relies on trust and debt in gateways and those issuing the IOUs.
How will the ripple IOUs be enforced?
Bitcoin exchanges already are central points of failure! And MtGox's bank has limited them to ten(!!) SWIFT transfers per day. The exchange situation is a clusterfuck - that's why we see the ridiculous spread between mtgox price and bitstamp price. How are the MtGox IOUs enforced? MtGox maintains utter and complete control over its IOUs - remember when they used to allow MtGox USD codes? They removed them. A ripple gateway would never be able to control its IOUs like that - a gateway's IOUs trade freely on the ripple order books. Why would someone think trying to sell the ability to create IOUs to bitcoiners would give them anything but shit and drama? Debt Stinks... I should know   Centralized bitcoin exchanges are not the only way in and out !!! you can do private exchanges just as easily, just like cash. LocalBitcoins is a similar method for facilitating private exchanges.
LocalBitcoins - and now we are back to the SneakerNet - a time before the internet!! And then you get the LocalBitcoins exchangers who want to sell them at the MtGox price. No, there is a better way which takes advantage of the internet and technology utilizing next-gen cryptocurrency for decentralized exchange: Ripple. MTGox =/= BTC Holy smoke! If I had 900 Bitcoins I would not be holding that in an exchange. I accept your point about exchanges, I hold all my bitcoins in my own wallet. Those are not IOU's On another thread someone said the ripple ledger is completely transparent. Is that true ? Might revise my opinion a bit if thats the case, and if its built in that it has to be the case. However my main doubts are how can you trust a centralised network? What if the authorities close it down and you lose all your funds? What if Opencoin decides to start inflating XRP? you only have their word that they won't create more. With bitcoin I don't have such doubts. Also nobody ever answers the question of who funds OpenCoin ?? Are banks behind it? Its a simple question. |
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In my opinion they are a threat, I have a similar thread on the speculation forum. Gateways will have incentive to lie about their reserves and fractionally lend out more bitcoins than they own. 'Bitcoin transactions' will occur outside the blockchain. The quantity of bitcoins will no longer be exactly known. Its a good recipe for undermining the power of commodity style crypto currency.
Exchanges already have the incentive to operate fractionally (ie pay themselves with depositor funds). There are no "bitcoin transactions" on ripple or anywhere else which happen outside the blockchain. You mean to say bitcoin trades - which already happen outside the blockchain. In fact, it is on the conventional exchanges that bitcoin trading takes place in an opaque system with proprietary order books where nobody knows much funds are actually backing the market. The same transparency we have at the core of the bitcoin network (where we see all the bitcoins on the blockchain), Ripple brings to the surrounding exchange ecosystem (where we can see all the IOUs on the ripple ledger). So it is now public knowledge on the ripple ledger that Bitstamp has issued $259,210 in USD IOUs and 2,321 BTC IOUs (bitstamp's current gateway capitalization). But can you say how much USD and BTC is owed by mtgox? Or any other bitcoin exchange? What you say is true about bitcoin exchanges, which is why I don't use them. I use localBitcoins and keep my bitcoins in my own wallet. Obviously I still have things to learn about ripple. I didn't know the ledger is transparent, thanks for that info |
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An earlier commenter said you could equate ripple versus bitcoin as being like the dollar versus gold. This is a good comparison I think. The battle today between dollar and gold is a battle between unlimited debt and assets with hard limits, just as ripple is unlimited debt versus assets like bitcoin. If a group of bankers gathered together to concieve a system to demasculate and control crytpo currency like bitcoin and litecoin, ripple is what they would come up with !  Who is funding OpenCoin anyway ? |
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XRP is also stored offline, the "secret key" you get when you create a ripple wallet is analogous to the private keys you can export on blockchain.info (on ripple.com/client, an encrypted blob is stored on payward.com and decrypted with your wallet name and password so the web-client can sign transactions with your secret key).
Now, even though you can take responsibility of your own private keys, your net worth is directly affected by problems at the major bitcoin exchanges. Especially when only one or two big exchanges maintain a monopoly (eg if trading lag at MtGox crashes your net worth). Centralized/"balkanized" bitcoin exchanges with wire transfers as the only way in and out are clearly a problem. Ripple is a solution for that (not saying that it's a perfect solution, but something that exists is better than something described in a proposal).
Centralized bitcoin exchanges are not the only way in and out !!! you can do private exchanges just as easily, just like cash. LocalBitcoins is a similar method for facilitating private exchanges. |
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Nice work |
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There is so much fundamentally wrong in this thread, it's hard to know where to start but let's start with the title. Ripples a threat to Bitcoin? I assume you mean XRP, the internal crypto currency and not Ripple, the p2p payment network. I think Bitcoin trumps XRP at least for now, because of it's abilities as a store of value. If XRP was ever to be an actual competitor of Bitcoin, it would actually be years and years down the road and only because users choose XRP over BTC. But for no other reason. It's important for people to note and understand the difference. If you don't like XRP, don't use it. Aside from minimum account requirements for tx fees to prevent spam, XRP can be irrelevant. Although it does have it's advantages within the Ripple payment network. The payment network, that is Ripple, is not a crypto currency. It's a decentralized, P2P payment network, allowing users to transact in any currency they choose. BTC, LTC, FTC, PPC, USD, EUR, CAD, INR, etc. With Ripple, now you don't have to beg merchants to accept your crypto of choice, merchants simply integrate with the Ripple network, similar to integrating with say, Paypal or Authorize.net. It becomes another method for merchants to accept payment but this one allows for payments in crypto and fiat currencies. For the merchant that dosen't want to directly accept BTC or LTC, no problem. They can choose to only receive payment in fiat currency. However, you the buyer can still pay the merchant in any currency you choose. Send the BTC and the Ripple network will automatically find the cheapest path to convert your BTC into the currency the merchant requires. Everybody is happy and transactions happen in seconds not minutes or even hours, which can be the case sometimes with the blockchain. Ripple makes up for the weaknesses in the payment network surrounding Bitcoin, etc. Whether it's internal crypto, XRP, is "better" than Bitcoin is totally subjective and irrelevant to the brilliance and benefit that the Ripple payment network provides to all the crypto world. EDIT: Just realized this was an old thread, bumped. Oh well... This is my opinion http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/ripples-a-debt-based-centrally-controlled-monetary-system/ |
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The bitcoin trader sold out |
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I'd forgotten about this thread!
Hi tokeweed whats the countdown for ?
Is that when the bitcoin singularity will happen ?
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"I know there are a million considerations and tons of holes in the above statements, don't be a dick and say it can never work. It is just a concept."
If you can't take any criticism of it why even mention it then ?
Proposal sounds a bit like communism where everyone is equal. Sounds great until you discover that some are more equal than others.
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A lot of gold, by 2025 fiat currencies will be a joke and a mistake we tell our children about.
This ^ In 2025 what will $1 be worth or will it even exist? If it does exist it will have changed, ie been backed by gold or something. The US dollar is losing its reserve status around the world. Other countries are already beginning to avoid it in favour of other currencies or gold swaps, sanctions against Iran failed spectacularly. Obama failed to invade Syria and disrupt new oil pipelines. US petro dollar looks to be dying. It is quite possible the US dollar will hyperinflate before 2025 as confidence is lost in it. Perhaps a new 'Amero' currency mirroring the Euro will be brought in by the globalists after the death of the dollar. It is much more likely that fiat currency will be dead by then than bitcoins |
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I'll take 1000000+ if anyones offering |
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I think the masses will be the last into bitcoin, too late to get any benefit from being early adopters, thats just the way the cookie crumbles. Until then they will continue as they are, not really noticing that the value of their money keeps decreasing relentlessly.
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Maybe BIll Gates is really Satoshi  |
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