So far, the only example of usefulness of Ripple in this thread is to support arbitrage across exchanges, but only if those exchanges accept Ripple. I understand that would be extremely useful for traders who regularly trade in multiple currencies.
Ripple itself is a distributed P2P exchange. It doesn't have a lot of liquidity yet, but it is a bona fide distributed exchange. That addresses one of the greatest weaknesses of the bitcoin ecosystem. But it *helps* Bitcoin in that respect, because it allows you to trade between bitcoin and any other currency. But why should the average Bitcoin user, who only has one type of fiat, bitcoins, and does some light trading on one exchange (coinbase/bitstampl/btcchina) even care about Ripple? Should they be lobbying their fiat banking institution to get connected to the Ripple network so that they can trade easier at international exchanges?
It's a matter of robustness of the ecosystem and resilience against repression. |
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Why would you use Bitcoin to send value overseas when instead you can use fiat with Ripple?
Why would you use Bitcoin to purchase online stuff when instead you can use fiat with Ripple?
Some wouldn't, and that's fine it it's their choice. But if you use fiat IOUs you are still at the mercy of governments and central banks. If you use cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ripple's own XRP, or whatever) you aren't. The fiat IOU payment system is then still a great way to get your hands on cryptocurrencies and to help accelerate their adoption. It's important to realise that Ripple is really several systems rolled into one: - XRP, a cryptocurrency much like bitcoin - a fiat IOU payment system - a distributed exchange which can be used for any currency, crypto or otherwise Also people calling Ripple centralized, but is that true?
No, that's a lie. It's also a P2P network, could he work if Ripple Lab were shut down?
Absolutely. In fact, their business depends on the network being able to survive the demise of Ripple Labs. Making Ripple dependent on Ripple Labs would have meant painting a larege target on their backs. Since Ripple Labs can no longer take down the Ripple network, governments will have much less of a motive to go after them, even if they did want to go after the Ripple network. Some of the people behind Ripple learned a hard lesson when eDonkey, an earlier company they were working on was taken down in order to take down its network. |
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I dunno. I guess I expect the EU to go along with whatever the US says.
I expect China to ban bitcoin if/once it gets really big regardless of what happens elsewhere.
I don't fell informed enough to speculate about the rest of the world.
I would expect any government to be uncomfortable with a currency they can't control, but then again this is happening in the eurozone, where national governments only control their joint currency collectively. And a small country like Montenegro has unilaterally adopted the euro as its official currency. China really wants to break the dollar's hegemony. They might prefer a currency no one can control to one controlled by the US government. Especially if that currency isn't going away anyway. Just to be clear i don't think the us will ban bitcoin. Say what you like i still believe that the us provides the world's leading environment for innovation. They are not so stupid as to fuck this up.
Understood. I'm not saying it either, just speculating about what might happen even if the USG did try to ban bitcoin. |
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In my opinion, bitcoin cannot survive if the US gov't decides to take the ax to it.
Don't you think that also depends on what the EU, Russia and China do? |
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"Ripple: A Distributed Exchange for Bitcoin" Except it isn't. If it was, and there was any liquidity to speak of it could serve a useful purpose for arbitrage, etc. It is a bona fide distributed exchange, but liquidity is very low. |
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1. You solve a problem and create several others which are significantly more intractable. Bad engineering.
What other problems would it create and why are they more intractable? |
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Not in the slightest.
Why not? It penalises those who hold back blocks. I'm not saying this doesn't lead to other problems, but simply saying "not in the slightest" without elaborating isn't very helpful. |
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Would incorporating the lexicographical ordering of all timestamps help when choosing between chains?
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Ripple is about as P2P as PayPal.
Huh? Anyone can run a validator and anyone can act as an ad hoc gateway. |
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Are Mt Gox or Bitstamp P2P currency exchanges?
No, and that's what makes Ripple superior to them IMO. But I get your point, they aren't a counter example. I still don't understand why you think Ripple cannot be a successful p2p currency exchange. I'd say it's an operational p2p currency exchange already, though it's perhaps too early to tell if it will be successful. |
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In order to support exchange functionality between Ripple currencies and real-world currencies, Ripple needs the a non-revolving credit line, but it doesn't have one. Nobody is going to be able to implement a successful P2P currency exchange on Ripple, because of this infinite inflation feature.
How is this different from Mt Gox or Bitstamp? By that reasoning they couldn't exist, but they do. |
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The only thing I (potentially) care about with regards to Ripple is everything about it that isn't XRP.
OK, but in that regard it still looks superior to existing exchanges to me. |
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And this is why Ripple will never be anything more than a PayPal clone with severe regulatory liability issues.
Huh? I don't see how Ripple will be more vulnerable to this than existing Bitcoin exchanges. And because of the possibility of rippling between trusted associates I think it is actually far superior to other exchanges. And don't forget that XRP has very similar properties to Bitcoin, your concern only applies to the fiat/crypto exchange layer, not to XRP. In the real world, trust is not binary. That's also why there exists in the world more than one primitive for representing trust in financial terms (credit).
What primitives do you think are required? |
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The ASIC arms race is making it harder and harder from some rich entity to corner the market.
But not for governments, which can monopolise access to ASIC mining hardware if they want to. They can't realistically do that with general purpose CPUs, or with widely available GPUs or even FPGAs. |
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By their (dumb) fruits shall ye know them indeed...
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Don't just trust random strangers on the internet, it means you are willing to make payments on their behalf (and on behalf of they people they trust and so on) and trust the person to pay you back. Trust is for small amounts only and for close associates only.
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That's the Costa Rican El Pais, I don't know if it's related to the Spanish one.
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Does anyone have a reference to this alleged fine for private use? What I've heard is that the Spanish government has slashed subsidies for ("feed-in tariffs") for solar energy. They may also have imposed fines, but I haven't found any references for that. In any event, privatisation is not the correct word for imposing fines.
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Intel is adding new SSE instructions for SHA calculations to their processors. While this will not make CPU mining for its own sake profitable, it may make running a mining process in the background whenever your computer is on for other reasons a sensible thing to do. This should help a bit with keeping Bitcoin distributed. It would be nice if the same thing happened for GPUs too. New Instructions Supporting the Secure Hash Algorithm on Intel® Architecture Processors |
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I hope the attendees will personally remind any feds that show up that they ought to be ashamed of themselves if they were involved. These people should be ostracised.
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