What will the open source Ripple competitor look like?

[Sukrim]

Well, I thought of extending Ripple to be used as back-end to a site like inputs.io or similar, working title "Cripple" (centralized Ripple). No, this is not sarcasm, there could be some benefits actually to this.

What more people wanted to see I think was a Ripple system that uses BTC instead of XRP for transaction fees and as market central currency - which would slow it down to Bitcoin speeds (if you don't accept 0-conf transactions, which is recommendable - but accepting them might be possible if you have many validators that all must have this transaction in their transaction list in Bitcoin + miners publishing the transactions they will include).

As Ripple by itself only gains traction because of its gateways, my guess is that the replacement of XRP with BTC itself is not too much of an issue to convince gateways to support this "Bitripple" fork, especially if it also has some downsides. Time will tell, maybe there are already some people working in secret on that? Publicly, I haven't seen anything on github at least...

[Hfleer]

Is Ripple still around?  They seemed to want to put a lot of effort into marketing it at the beginning, and then it just died out, thought they gave up on it or something.

[Sukrim]

They seem to market far less towards bitcoiners nowadays... more towards the other ~99.9% of the population.

It is definitely around, very much alive and has probably more code written per week than all the altcoins in this forum together in a month. It works amazingly well for Bitcoins, a gateway recently added Google wallet so you can now buy XRP (that can be converted to BTC then) with credit cards for ~5% fee flat for example. I usually just simply use them and try to not preach or convince people around here of anything (it didn't work when Bitcoin was viewed as ponzi scam, why should it work for Ripple?) and just help or clear confusion (like the infamous "if A trusts B and B trusts C, A trusts C!!111" - which is simply wrong, as trust is not transitive!).

Server (in C++): https://github.com/ripple/rippled
Client (in Javascript): https://github.com/ripple/ripple-client
Library for talking to the server in JS: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib
(since Friday) Java client library: https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib-java

Also their new website is kinda neat, including a live ticker of transactions etc.

Anyways, they are definitely not dying out and are also still expanding their team, currently being one of the larger companies that came from Bitcoin at this point I guess.

[Arvicco]

Well, I thought of extending Ripple to be used as back-end to a site like inputs.io or similar, working title "Cripple" (centralized Ripple). No, this is not sarcasm, there could be some benefits actually to this.

This may actually be a valid application for this technology - centrally controlled, but possibly distributed payment backend. Leaving no doubt among its users that there is a central administrator and a single point of failure. However, to market this technology as a kind of "decentralized payment network", like RL used to - this is just a great misstatement of facts, bordering on dishonesty, IMHO.

If I was a developer of such system, though, I'd be very worried about Ripple Labs aggressive legal stance towards "imitators" - see TOS.

[Sukrim]

Well, Ripple itself IS a decentralized payment network, not a centralized one (that would be only true after my patches - project is at the time on hold though, as it would require disabling too much functionality to work for my use case... simpler solutions work better with centralized systems).

As I said "Cripple" is only the working title, I would ask anyways beforehand or just use a different name, like "inputts"... and I don't really see why I should be "very worried" about a company's ToS halfway around the globe.

By the way - Bitcoin is trademarked too and owned by MtGox.

[Arvicco]

By the way - Bitcoin is trademarked too and owned by MtGox.

Once they start marketing any product under this trademark and enforcing their trademark against others, like RippleLabs does, I'll call their product/service proprietary as well. Since this did not happen yet, and unlikely to happen in future, I really fail to see any parallels here.

[markm]

Ripple sounded interesting at first, but after a while there was just too much "opportunity cost" in waiting day after day after day for the code.

So I pretty much had to forget about it and move on to other things.

That applies both to all the gateways I wanted to set up and to the various people who were interested in the possibility of being able to run their own currency without the vulnerabilities of a blockchain.

Sure some day month year or decade I'll likely get around to looking at it again but now other things have been taken up so there just isn't spare time to screw around with Ripple, plus of course the whole delay delay delay crap put a bad smell on the whole thing that leads to even wondering whether what they finally did release will turn out to actually work.

(Afterall as far as I know the gateway code included still isn't fit for real use, is it?)

-MarkM-

[MAbtc]

I expect more interest to return to Ripple following open-source ... kind of a disappointment! 

[markm]

Well no hurry eh, they took forever to release it so now we can take forever to get around to reacting to that fact.

-MarkM-

[Arvicco]

I expect more interest to return to Ripple following open-source ... kind of a disappointment!  

I think OpenCoin/RippleLabs decision to keep source code closed for so long did themselves a great disservice. By the time they eventually open sourced it to great fanfare, they've already acquired hard-to-fix negative rep among both FOSS and Bitcoin communities. Most developers who would be interested in working with this code lost interest and moved on to other projects. If OC did not lose their FOSS cred from the very beginning, developer interest may lead to further adoption and powerful momentum. None of it seems likely at the moment, with ripple.com more or less a ghost town by now. With number of active users, volume of transactions and trade amount not only stagnant, but even falling compared to earlier periods.

[Arvicco]

As a user the Ripple client is still horrible to use, and the servers are often down. Is there any way to use it without using the ripple.com client?

I've used to develop a command line client for Ripple: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150447. It is not supported any longer, but should be still functional for most simple use cases.

[Sukrim]

If you did any serious trading on Ripple, you'd have your own rippled + local client for better performance anyways (and you'd use the API, not the client...). On one hand people complain that it is "dead", on the other hand official servers are overloaded.

If you use Ubuntu, there is a PPA available with rippled binaries too, so you don't even need to wait the 2 minutes it takes to build.