WTF happened to ripple?

[markm]

That just makes claiming it is not a currency and warning people not to treat it as one make all the more sense.

Do you have democracy in your country?

If so, what measures are in place to ensure that there is a viable market, without crashes, for votes, so speculators buying votes are ensured the price won't crash out from under them?

Just curious...

-MarkM-

[dacoinminster]

Hey Joel,

Thanks for answering so many questions on this thread. I'm hoping you can answer a couple more:

First, can you describe what benefits Ripple has over colored coins? The ripple client looks great, and is very easy to use, but couldn't the same IOUs be issued and traded using colored bitcoins?

I've been watching the development of colored coins over at bitcoinx.org, as I consider trade in stable currencies to be a "the next big step" for distributed currency. Ripple seems to have some great momentum, so maybe you will stay ahead of colored coins just based on getting there first.

Second, are you planning on support for IOUs denominated in user-specified units? For instance, could I use Ripple to release IOUs denominated in barrels of crude oil? Could I release IOUs denominated in future profits of a company (essentially a stock offering)?

Thanks!

[JoelKatz]

First, can you describe what benefits Ripple has over colored coins? The ripple client looks great, and is very easy to use, but couldn't the same IOUs be issued and traded using colored bitcoins?

Theoretically the same IOUs could be issued using colored Bitcoins, but then you're cramming a round peg into a square hole. Because Ripple is designed to do this, it has features that makes this not just possible but efficient. Colored coins are good for smart property, but I don't see how they get you things like payment paths and distributed exchanges.

Second, are you planning on support for IOUs denominated in user-specified units? For instance, could I use Ripple to release IOUs denominated in barrels of crude oil? Could I release IOUs denominated in future profits of a company (essentially a stock offering)?

The network just treats a currency as an opaque 160-bit number. A portion of that namespace is reserved for three-letter currency codes. The network itself has no list of valid codes, so if you want to use "XBL" for barrels of crude, you can. The client has a list of known currencies, but anyone can modify that list and we can add configurable currencies to store in the wallet if there's demand.

On our planned feature list is fully custom currencies. A custom currency would be created by someone and would have an entry in the ledger. Its currency code would be a hash that would allow the client to find its specification. Custom currencies could be associated with a particular web site and have custom display rules and so on. The feature set is not fully fleshed out yet as the only real use case we have to far as demurrage.

[dacoinminster]

Theoretically the same IOUs could be issued using colored Bitcoins, but then you're cramming a round peg into a square hole. Because Ripple is designed to do this, it has features that makes this not just possible but efficient. Colored coins are good for smart property, but I don't see how they get you things like payment paths and distributed exchanges.

The network just treats a currency as an opaque 160-bit number. A portion of that namespace is reserved for three-letter currency codes. The network itself has no list of valid codes, so if you want to use "XBL" for barrels of crude, you can. The client has a list of known currencies, but anyone can modify that list and we can add configurable currencies to store in the wallet if there's demand.

On our planned feature list is fully custom currencies. A custom currency would be created by someone and would have an entry in the ledger. Its currency code would be a hash that would allow the client to find its specification. Custom currencies could be associated with a particular web site and have custom display rules and so on. The feature set is not fully fleshed out yet as the only real use case we have to far as demurrage.

Regarding custom currencies: awesome! For me, that is the really attractive use case for something like Ripple.

Regarding colored coins: Forum user killerstorm has demonstrated atomic trades and proof-of-concept for distributed exchange of colored coins. Bitcoinx.org is (IMHO) your closest competition, so you would be wise to keep a close eye on what they are doing.

I am watching both your project and theirs with great interest. Keep up the good work!

[jtimon]

You can actually map the colored coins to Ripple IOUs, and trade IOUs inside Ripple to avoid horrendous blockchain bloat that is inevitable if colored coins pick up in any significant way. Colored coin issuers can serve as Ripple gateways themselves or delegate this function to specialized nodes (depositories) that manage multiple securities/issuers.

This is really exciting, a combination of Ripple and colored coins can be used to re-invent the whole financial system as we know it at a fraction of a cost.

Let's not forget other technologies and designs for "colorable cryptoassets".

Open Transactions (OT): my main objection to chaumian "cash" (apart from the badly chosen term "cash", for something that looks and cuacks like credit) is that it cannot be "rippled" in a transitive but atomic transaction, but as maaku proposed it can be implemented on top of a PoW chain and probably a ledger consensus system too and be more p2p. It has better privacy than colored coins and much better than Ripple's (is not free to cycle keypairs in the ledger). For me the non-ripplable flaw takes it out of the game, but many use cases (say stocks or bonds) don't really need that.

Two phase ripple protocol (2PR): it has good privacy too and can use both a blockchain or ledger to achieve atomicity. That's practically equivalent to hash non-public transactions into the tree, so I think the best option would be to directly integrate it in the ledger or the chain or both. Disadvantages: intermediaries must be online, which also kind of disqualifies it for some smart property use cases.
My wish is a ripple atomic transaction containing both pseudonymous and private IOU transfers, and I have a little draft for that: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/rippleusers/05c9JlxCmXs/discussion

Oh, and a shared disadvantage of both colored coins and 2PR is that they can't publish binding offers. That's a disadvantage ripplecoin didn't had. Maybe colored coins usage ends up turning bitcoin into ripplecoin (or an equivalent) through a series of convenient and non-polemic hard forks, who knows.

Certainly any of these cryptoassets/ripple implementations has the potential to be highly disruptive, but we shouldn't discard the possibility of an ecosystem with several of them disrupting the financial/monetary system together.
It is good to have various bullets: resilience.

[gmaxwell]

Oh, and a shared disadvantage of both colored coins and 2PR is that they can't publish binding offers. That's a disadvantage ripplecoin didn't had. Maybe colored coins usage ends up turning bitcoin into ripplecoin (or an equivalent) through a series of convenient and non-polemic hard forks, who knows.

I'm really doubtful there. Global blockchains to aggregate color coins has horrible scalability and is rife with cost externalization and commons risk.  I think schemes which do not require perpetual global consensus are more interesting especially in terms of things-that-add-to-the-bitcoin-ecosystem.

[jtimon]

Oh, and a shared disadvantage of both colored coins and 2PR is that they can't publish binding offers. That's a disadvantage ripplecoin didn't had. Maybe colored coins usage ends up turning bitcoin into ripplecoin (or an equivalent) through a series of convenient and non-polemic hard forks, who knows.

I'm really doubtful there. Global blockchains to aggregate color coins has horrible scalability and is rife with cost externalization and commons risk.  I think schemes which do not require perpetual global consensus are more interesting especially in terms of things-that-add-to-the-bitcoin-ecosystem.

Good point. Actually I think 2PR will be the best for scalability, but there's some use cases that require public pseudonymous accounting.
And I don't know if it would have been better to start with 2PR, but public accounting of arbitrary assets is what is being developed now. The ledger of course implements Ripple, and colored coins could do it too.
Would binding offers on the blockchain make colored coins based ripple non-scalable? I don't think so, just maybe a little bit more expensive than other solutions like out-of-the-chain "advertising". That would still be possible adding the new feature (hard fork required), but you're just allowing to intermediaries to participate on transactions when they're offline and can't sign.
But of course, if you make that hard fork you would directly eliminate the necessity of "tainted satoshis" and differentiate between btc and IOU from now on.
By the way, only a bit is necessary, I don't like those three letter codes on ripple's ledger. Want to issue two denominations? Create two addresses and connect them at the rate you prefer.

[gmaxwell]

In this old thread I described how the Ripple consensus model was unsound... that it could be expected to spontaneously break unless the topology met certain characteristics which were unlikely to be met by any graph except a centrally controlled one and that without additional unspecified functionality (perhaps hidden in assumed behaviour of users or via centralization) couldn't resist sibyl attacks. Unfortunately Ripple's creators responded to these concerns-- to the extent that they responded at all-- with evasion and a seeming refusal to make a clear statement of their security assumptions that, coupled with their design, supported their security claims.  And the media and finance industry seems to have largely swallowed their claims without much critical thinking seemingly counting on an orgy of social proof that seems to have been ultimately backed by the same nothingness that backs their pre-mined currency.

I wasn't the only person to point out these issues, more recently Ripple labs published a paper claiming the soundness of their model, which made a number of clearly illogical arguments and rested on many unclear and unsubstantiated assumptions, and it was also criticized by Andrew Miller, for many of the same reasons I criticized it here.

(and in this thread I was handicapped by the fact that ripple was closed source at this time: but even so its limitations were apparent simply from the seemingly impossible claims that its creators couldn't back up)

On Tuesday at a Bitcoin event I was still being harangued by Ripple/Stellar advocates claiming the absolute soundness of the system.  I care about the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem since, in the minds of the public any failure is harmful to all of us, and I don't want to see anyone suffer losses not even the gullible... But it makes no sense for me to spend my limited time providing free consulting for the impossibly torrent of ill-advised, impossibility claiming, systems... especially when they're not thankful and/or respond with obfuscation that makes their work unrealizable or hand-waving without admitting their new assumptions. I don't want to see anyone get hurt, but ... hey, I spoke up a bit and people continued on anyways without asking the kind of tough questions they should have been asking. I'm certainly not going to spend all me time correcting everyone who is wrong on the internet, especially when altcoin folks have been known to play pretty dirty toward their critics. No one should assume that other people are going to go out of their way to beg them to not use something broken.

So, when I found out that Stellar spontaneously split consensus state, apparently just as I described in this thread, without even an attacker (though any consensus split is easily exploited by attackers of opportunity once it exists)-- Well, the only thing that surprised me was the burst of honesty in admitting that the system was unsound, but I was also disappointed that the lack of frankness about how fundamental the limitations are in this space-- instead advocating the hope of magical fixes sure to be found by a respected authority, and I was also disappointed that no mention was given of that fact that other experienced people in this space had warned of precisely these issues, going back several years.   I also was saddened to see that no one noticed the dissonance in the 'temporary' solution of converting to a centralized model:  If a system can be converted by some loss correcting central bank into a centralized system ... can we really say it was ever decentralized in the first place?

Perhaps in the future more people will ask the hard questions and demand better answers?  If so, it would be worth more time for experienced people to spend time reviewing other systems and we could all benefit. Otherwise, perhaps those who aren't interested in standing up to some of the rigor we'd normally expect from a cryptosystem will stop calling their broken altcoins "cryptocurrencies".  Those of us who actually want to build sound systems don't want our work sullied by these predictable failures, and being able to say "I told you so" is no consolation.

[Sukrim]

So, when I found out that Stellar spontaneously split consensus state, apparently just as I described in this thread

Proof? To me it seems like the changes in https://github.com/stellar/stellard/commit/067d7158720331937fc782cbb230e8d422cd7341 (especially "Consider there is consensus when we detect that we've fallen behind") which are exclusive to Stellar are potentially to blame, not their validation network topology (validators that were operated by one entitiy - SDF - started to disagree with each other, even though they likely had identical UNLs).

I also was saddened to see that no one noticed the dissonance in the 'temporary' solution of converting to a centralized model:  If a system can be converted by some loss correcting central bank into a centralized system ... can we really say it was ever decentralized in the first place?

If that "bank" is system relevant, maybe...? Consider that one day a large majority of Bitcoin exchanges and service providers (BitPay, Coinbase...) decide to only accept Bitcoins sent on their centrally mined block chain. Either they all remove themselves immediately from the Bitcoin community or the Bitcoin community has to move over to their centralized solution. While Bitcoin's community consists of lots of people with lots of different ideas, that's something that is not very likely to "fly"... Stellar on the other hand consists mainly of fake accounts that were used to grab facebook giveaways. Also not a lot of people seem competent enough to run their own nodes (it is not incentivized after all, compared to Bitcoin where at least miners need to run full nodes). In practice, the SDF likely is the only major player (main hosted wallet that contacts SDF hosted nodes by default) in that ecosystem, so it is not that hard to (re)take control over the whole network.

[princesultan1]

In this old thread I described how the Ripple consensus model was unsound... that it could be expected to spontaneously break unless the topology met certain characteristics which were unlikely to be met by any graph except a centrally controlled one and that without additional unspecified functionality (perhaps hidden in assumed behaviour of users or via centralization) couldn't resist sibyl attacks. Unfortunately Ripple's creators responded to these concerns-- to the extent that they responded at all-- with evasion and a seeming refusal to make a clear statement of their security assumptions that, coupled with their design, supported their security claims.  And the media and finance industry seems to have largely swallowed their claims without much critical thinking seemingly counting on an orgy of social proof that seems to have been ultimately backed by the same nothingness that backs their pre-mined currency.

I wasn't the only person to point out these issues, more recently Ripple labs published a paper claiming the soundness of their model, which made a number of clearly illogical arguments and rested on many unclear and unsubstantiated assumptions, and it was also criticized by Andrew Miller, for many of the same reasons I criticized it here.

(and in this thread I was handicapped by the fact that ripple was closed source at this time: but even so its limitations were apparent simply from the seemingly impossible claims that its creators couldn't back up)

On Tuesday at a Bitcoin event I was still being harangued by Ripple/Stellar advocates claiming the absolute soundness of the system.  I care about the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem since, in the minds of the public any failure is harmful to all of us, and I don't want to see anyone suffer losses not even the gullible... But it makes no sense for me to spend my limited time providing free consulting for the impossibly torrent of ill-advised, impossibility claiming, systems... especially when they're not thankful and/or respond with obfuscation that makes their work unrealizable or hand-waving without admitting their new assumptions. I don't want to see anyone get hurt, but ... hey, I spoke up a bit and people continued on anyways without asking the kind of tough questions they should have been asking. I'm certainly not going to spend all me time correcting everyone who is wrong on the internet, especially when altcoin folks have been known to play pretty dirty toward their critics. No one should assume that other people are going to go out of their way to beg them to not use something broken.

So, when I found out that Stellar spontaneously split consensus state, apparently just as I described in this thread, without even an attacker (though any consensus split is easily exploited by attackers of opportunity once it exists)-- Well, the only thing that surprised me was the burst of honesty in admitting that the system was unsound, but I was also disappointed that the lack of frankness about how fundamental the limitations are in this space-- instead advocating the hope of magical fixes sure to be found by a respected authority, and I was also disappointed that no mention was given of that fact that other experienced people in this space had warned of precisely these issues, going back several years.   I also was saddened to see that no one noticed the dissonance in the 'temporary' solution of converting to a centralized model:  If a system can be converted by some loss correcting central bank into a centralized system ... can we really say it was ever decentralized in the first place?

Perhaps in the future more people will ask the hard questions and demand better answers?  If so, it would be worth more time for experienced people to spend time reviewing other systems and we could all benefit. Otherwise, perhaps those who aren't interested in standing up to some of the rigor we'd normally expect from a cryptosystem will stop calling their broken altcoins "cryptocurrencies".  Those of us who actually want to build sound systems don't want our work sullied by these predictable failures, and being able to say "I told you so" is no consolation.

https://ripple.com/why-the-stellar-forking-issue-does-not-affect-ripple/