After testing Ripple...

[JoelKatz]

I'm still very skeptical of this new system.  Especially the things talked about in this thread.  If XRP are anti-spam, they should be invisible to the user (or as close to invisible as possible).

Say, for example, an anti-spam scheme limited someone to ten emails a day. Would you want the ten email limit hidden so that you sent ten and then all of a sudden couldn't send any emails? Or would you prefer it be very clear that there's a ten email limit with a counter that goes down with each email sent? The way you stop spam is to make people cognizant of the resources they're using and aware that they are scarce.

Also, they list as "advanced" the trust network, which is the whole point of the original system.

Don't equate the internal system with the client. The client is designed to make it easy to do what we think people will want to do most. Right now, I don't think that's community credit, I think it's payment through gateways. Promoting community credit and making it easy for people to use and understand the consequences of what they're doing is a hard problem. I do truly believe that it could change the way people think about money in the future and having a payment system widely deployed that supported it will, I think, make it inevitable. But it's not Ripple's first step.

[TingCoin]

If my assumption is correct the point of Ripple isn't to offer an alternate cryptocurrency, but to become an instant currency exchange (between both fiat and crypto and fiat-fiat crypto-crypto). So you can deposit any currency in to Ripple, and instantly convert it to whatever currency you want in the whole world, then cash it out and in to your fiat bank (or BitCoin wallet if you want BitCoins).

Can anyone confirm that this is what Ripple intends to do?
If so, it's going to be an amazing platform with the potential to squash PayPal. As (again, if my assumptions are correct) there will be no fees for converting, say GBP to USD like with PayPal. And the owners of Ripples only form of profit will be their new cryptocurrency (XRP).

[JoelKatz]

Can anyone confirm that this is what Ripple intends to do?

Yes.

[drawingthesun]

Hmm, they should have used BTC in denominations of "satoshi" for the spam problem, this would maybe allow ripple to gain adoption and people would focus on the trust system more.

Unfortunately it looks like having 100 billion XRP that can be traded for other currency is a little devious, they say its anti spam, then they should have truly complemented BTC by using .00000001 BTC for anti spam (or .0000001 or .000001 ,etc...)

The XRP, we are told is all about anti spam and its not meant to compete with BTC. This is a load of crap. Lies lies lies!

I they really wanted to focus on trust based IOUs they could have easily used BTC to facilitate the transactions in small almost worthless denominations. But instead they create a stealth currency.

This new ripple is far too deceptive.

And a small handful own all the XRP? with current trades on various forums and sites making these people multi-millionaires already.

I see no reason why someone could not build a ripple trust system on top of BTC.

[JoelKatz]

Unfortunately it looks like having 100 billion XRP that can be traded for other currency is a little devious, they say its anti spam, then they should have truly complemented BTC by using .00000001 BTC for anti spam (or .0000001 or .000001 ,etc...)

There's no good way to do this. Bitcoins could only be held on the Ripple system if someone were to gateway them, and there's no way to trust a particular gateway without having a central authority. Also, that would make Ripple's anti-spam system a Bitcoin spamming system as every Ripple transaction required a Bitcoin micro-transactions.

I they really wanted to focus on trust based IOUs they could have easily used BTC to facilitate the transactions in small almost worthless denominations. But instead they create a stealth currency.

We honestly had no idea how to make that work for the reasons I describe above. Perhaps you could sketch out how your scheme would work.

And a small handful own all the XRP? with current trades on various forums and sites making these people multi-millionaires already.

Billions of XRP will be given away shortly, as the system is ready to scale.

I see no reason why someone could not build a ripple trust system on top of BTC.

I can give you a long list of reasons why that won't work. Maybe solutions could be found to each one of them, but I suspect that you don't see any reasons just because you haven't looked too closely at the problem. (But if you think you can make it work, by all means please work on it!)

[drawingthesun]

Unfortunately it looks like having 100 billion XRP that can be traded for other currency is a little devious, they say its anti spam, then they should have truly complemented BTC by using .00000001 BTC for anti spam (or .0000001 or .000001 ,etc...)

There's no good way to do this. Bitcoins could only be held on the Ripple system if someone were to gateway them, and there's no way to trust a particular gateway without having a central authority. Also, that would make Ripple's anti-spam system a Bitcoin spamming system as every Ripple transaction required a Bitcoin micro-transactions.

I they really wanted to focus on trust based IOUs they could have easily used BTC to facilitate the transactions in small almost worthless denominations. But instead they create a stealth currency.

We honestly had no idea how to make that work for the reasons I describe above. Perhaps you could sketch out how your scheme would work.

And a small handful own all the XRP? with current trades on various forums and sites making these people multi-millionaires already.

Billions of XRP will be given away shortly, as the system is ready to scale.

I see no reason why someone could not build a ripple trust system on top of BTC.

I can give you a long list of reasons why that won't work. Maybe solutions could be found to each one of them, but I suspect that you don't see any reasons just because you haven't looked too closely at the problem. (But if you think you can make it work, by all means please work on it!)

Yeah that is a good point, the blockchain spam on BTC would get out of hand, even worse than Satoshi Dice. I imagined, maybe naively than the BTC would be used in the system maybe internally to the ripple blockchain, and when people make IOU's the spent BTC would be evenly distributed out to all the users (Is this what happens to XRP when spent for IOU transactions) But the important thing being all this transaction data would remain internal to the ripple blockchain until someone wanted to spend them outside of the ripple network.

This means people want to make a trust network and make a IOU, then they case in some BTC to the ripple account, and use small denominations of BTC to make the IOU transaction, just like XRP does now. The spent BTC is redistributed to all users (internally a "satoshi" can be split into a billion peices, so if a billion transactions were made in a day each user would gain 1 satoshi.) and if a user wanted BTC back they cash it out of the ripple blockchain.

Maybe that would be more feasible if a satoshi could be split into a billion pieces already....

Again this is a naive viewpoint from myself, I have no idea if what I just described is implementable at all.

[JoelKatz]

Yeah that is a good point, the blockchain spam on BTC would get out of hand, even worse than Satoshi Dice. I imagined, maybe naively than the BTC would be used in the system maybe internally to the ripple blockchain, and when people make IOU's the spent BTC would be evenly distributed out to all the users (Is this what happens to XRP when spent for IOU transactions) But the important thing being all this transaction data would remain internal to the ripple blockchain until someone wanted to spend them outside of the ripple network.

People, including myself, have been looking for a way to move Bitcoins out of the block chain and into another system (such that it can be moved back) without a central authority that holds the key needed to spend the bitcoins. So far as I know, nobody has figured out any way to do that. If you could though, it would be great for Bitcoin and make possible all kinds of new applications.

[jking]

i dont see why not to 'ripple-trust' me Thanx

Just remember, if you extend $5 in trust to someone, they can wind up owing you $5. If you don't have a settlement agreement with them, that could mean that $5 you intended to be able to spend or cash out is now a worthless IOU. Trust in Ripple is a powerful thing.

Are settlement agreements always negotiated externally, ie. by word of mouth? Or are they written into the public ledger?

[JoelKatz]

Are settlement agreements always negotiated externally, ie. by word of mouth? Or are they written into the public ledger?

They are always external. We considered the idea of a flag or indication in the ledger, but there didn't seem to be much point.

[jtimon]

Hmm, they should have used BTC in denominations of "satoshi" for the spam problem, this would maybe allow ripple to gain adoption and people would focus on the trust system more.

If you're referring to something like this:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Alternative_chain#Paying_for_resources_on_alternative_chains_with_Bitcoins

their system would rely on the ledger consensus AND ALSO on bitcoin's chain for security, it would be far more complex, the improved latency of the new system would be cancelled...
And all this apparently for no good reason.
If it's about the non-p2p issuance, the new system would still be better by just issuing the coins through proof of work as a one time only thing.
It turns out that when you imagine such a distribution mechanism without providing any security (like the issuance of bitcoin is providing to bitcoin or the 20% of freicoin's is providing to freicoin), it becomes more clear that is wasteful and there must be a better way. At least that happens to me, obviously other people here think different.

I see no reason why someone could not build a ripple trust system on top of BTC.

Actually you can. With colored coins you can build ripple transactions (with several "colors"), but for now there's only a prototype for simple "One color for BTC (uncolored coins)" transactions.
But colored coins rules are not enforced by the chain, only the amounts. Everything else is outside and must be made "manually".
For example, take this ripple graph:

Alice owes 10 to Bob
Bob owes 10 to Carol
Carol pays 10 to Alice

In Ripple, all get back to zero automatically, the ledger enforces that. In colored coins, although it can be made atomically too, Carol needs to explicitly send bob's 10 back to Bob, and bob needs to sign that he sends back to Alice her 10 IOUs too.
Apart from requiring a more complex implementation, it requires all parties involved to be online at the moment the transaction is created, with the ledger only the payer needs to be online.
Bitcoin would require a hard fork to do that. Since they're not forking Bitcoin, obviously they consider the ledger superior to the blockchain as a p2p consensus mechanism.
That doesn't mean Ripple can't help Bitcoin grow though.

[phelix]

So far i keep reading lots of vague information & buzzwords on the net about Ripple, and I still cannot figure what it exactly is and what it will actually do.

Would somebody care to explain it to me in few simple words ?

I'll give it a try:

It is an alternacoin but quite different.

There is a couple of servers (currently only one, to be open sourced; I think of it as similar to an electrum server).
They reach "consensus" about the state of an all tx containing "ledger" via majority vote among a list of manually selected servers ("UNL", "unique node list"). The server operator has to make sure the majority of servers on the UNL do not collaborate but are independent.

* No proof of work necessary.
* Transactions should be done in less than 30secs.
* There is a huge premine.
* Something similar (or better than) colored coins is available out of the box (the whole "IOU" stuff)
* All is easy to use and looks nice on the client side.
* Low disk space requirement for servers, too.
* edit: there are integrated exchanges with order books for all the IOUs (i think colored coins has that too, at least theoretically)

IMHO it would be interesting for bitcoin to make use of the consensus idea to speed up transactions. Also the hashtree thing is interesting (or whatever it is that makes it work with little disk space).

[Trading]

To be able to see trades on the order book and trade in the Ripple exchange (to access it you have to log in your Ripple account) you have to trust one of the current gateways (weexchange.co or bitstamp.net; better try this second one first). You don't need to give them big amounts of trust, 1 USD or even 0.1 USD is enough. To trust them, click at the advance tab on the top (is the 4th) and then in trust. Add the address of bitstamp (rvYAfWj5gh67oV6fW32ZzP3Aw4Eubs59B), set the amount of trust and add it. In a few seconds you receive the ok answer.
Then, click the trade tab and indicate the bitstamp address rvYAfWj5gh67oV6fW32ZzP3Aw4Eubs59B as the issuer. Now you can see on the order book tab the current orders. Happy trade

[dancupid]

It doesn't work.
I have tradefortress  'bitcoins', but I can't do anything with them. They are sitting in my account.
I can't send them back to tradefortress, I can't delete them, I can't trade them. I don't want them.
How do I differentiate these 'bitcoins' from other 'bitcoins'?

[ElectricMucus]

It doesn't work.
I have tradefortress  'bitcoins', but I can't do anything with them. They are sitting in my account.
I can't send them back to tradefortress, I can't delete them, I can't trade them. I don't want them.
How do I differentiate these 'bitcoins' from other 'bitcoins'?

cool story bro.

But I have to congratulate you, it takes serious mental gymnastics to arrive where you are now.

[Astrophysical]

I will be glad to get rid of my 399 XRP.

[JoelKatz]

It doesn't work.
I have tradefortress  'bitcoins', but I can't do anything with them. They are sitting in my account.
I can't send them back to tradefortress, I can't delete them, I can't trade them. I don't want them.
How do I differentiate these 'bitcoins' from other 'bitcoins'?

I'm not sure what you mean by how do you differentiate them. It seems like you already have -- these are different because they are worthless. If you want to get rid of them, drop your trust line to him to zero and see if anyone will take them from you. If not, you can "write them off" by paying them back to him.

[TheSwede75]

Ripple is 100% scam. Imagine a new coin that is 100% premined owned by 10 people. That's ripple. You have to be mentally slow to buy into that crap.

[ElectricMucus]

Ripple is 100% scam. Imagine a new coin that is 100% premined owned by 10 people. That's ripple. You have to be mentally slow to buy into that crap.

Just like stocks are 100% premined scam, that's right the entire economy is a scam!

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Wow, nice to find this old thread active again. I collected new information so i think can bring huge input to this discussion.

Well, i know it looks stupid to answer me myself, but i will give it a try.

So far i keep reading lots of vague information & buzzwords on the net about Ripple, and I still cannot figure what it exactly is and what it will actually do.

Would somebody care to explain it to me in few simple words ?

"Ripple is a despicable scam that tries to lure suckers into another FIAT central banking system using lies of being open source and decentralized".

I think that nails it.

EDIT:

Ripple is 100% scam. Imagine a new coin that is 100% premined owned by 10 people. That's ripple. You have to be mentally slow to buy into that crap.

Just like stocks are 100% premined scam, that's right the entire economy is a scam!

That is not the real reason ripple is a scam. Ripple is a scam, because they use lies to get you (and your money) into the game, so they can get more profit.

[ElectricMucus]

Ripple is 100% scam. Imagine a new coin that is 100% premined owned by 10 people. That's ripple. You have to be mentally slow to buy into that crap.

Just like stocks are 100% premined scam, that's right the entire economy is a scam!

That is not the real reason ripple is a scam. Ripple is a scam, because they use lies get you (and your money) into the game, so they can get more profit.

You realize that you guys gonna hit a brick wall once ripple comes out of beta?
Either way you can get access to the source of rippled right now if you reveal your openid to opencoin.