After testing Ripple...

[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'?

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.

If I send the bitcoins back to tradefortress how do I know he is not going to receive my bitstamp bitcoin IOUs? I only want to return the worthless tradefortress bitcoin IOUs.

If I take a $100 bill, declare it as worthless and give it away is it really such? If ripple is successful TF will just have a bunch of debt. He then can claim it's worthless all he wants, people won't care.
He made a gamble that ripple will fail, which would be ok if he had some stakes to win.

He has bitcoins - that's his stake.
but it's clear that Ripple IOUs don't work - the experiment proves it.
People will just end up with a load of junk in their Ripple account.
'trust me for $1000 and I'll send you $100 - here's my ripple address just give me yours' in a million email accounts every day.

[ElectricMucus]

'trust me for $1000 and I'll send you $100 - here's my ripple address just give me yours' in a million email accounts every day.

How about no? How about I only trust people in ripple I do actually trust?

Yeah ripple IOUs don't work - if you are purposefully missing the point.

[JoelKatz]

He has bitcoins - that's his stake.
but it's clear that Ripple IOUs don't work - the experiment proves it.
People will just end up with a load of junk in their Ripple account.
'trust me for $1000 and I'll send you $100 - here's my ripple address just give me yours' in a million email accounts every day.

He proved that it's possible to do useless and bad things with Ripple. The same is true of a hammer.

[dancupid]

'trust me for $1000 and I'll send you $100 - here's my ripple address just give me yours' in a million email accounts every day.

How about no? How about I only trust people in ripple I do actually trust?

Yeah ripple IOUs don't work - if you are purposefully missing the point.

Several hundred people on this forum trusted tradefortress for 100btc - the very fact that they are on this forum suggests that they at least understand enough to know that they shouldn't have - imagine that spreading out across the world to people who don't understand anything.
'hey man trust me for $100 and i'll give you a discount' - people will just do it - there's a $ sign in their account - why would they not believe the money is real?

[ElectricMucus]

'trust me for $1000 and I'll send you $100 - here's my ripple address just give me yours' in a million email accounts every day.

How about no? How about I only trust people in ripple I do actually trust?

Yeah ripple IOUs don't work - if you are purposefully missing the point.

Several hundred people on this forum trusted tradefortress for 100btc - the very fact that they are on this forum suggests that they at least understand enough to know that they shouldn't have - imagine that spreading out across the world to people who don't understand anything.
'hey man trust me for $100 and i'll give you a discount' - people will just do it - there's a $ sign in their account - why would they not believe the money is real?

I think the bitcoin newbie forum is the last place in the world where people actually would understand what trust means. The unique combination of greed and lack of knowledge is unprecedented.
TF knew this, that's why he started the scheme there. Most of the people involved didn't even know ripple.

You can say greed is an exploit for trust, in which case TF exploited human nature not ripple.


Edison electrocuted an elephant to show the dangers of AC power, and while he was correct it would kill the elephant we use AC over DC power all over the world now.

[JoelKatz]

You can say greed is an exploit for trust, in which case TF exploited human nature not ripple.

As a result of extensive discussions with users, we're going to make it so that pathways, by default, cannot be "rippled through" unless the previous link in the payment path was a redemption. I don't think that will do much to avoid this "exploit" -- you can probably just convince people to change the default. But it will allow people to hold balances from more than one gateway in the same currency without having as much exposure to a single unstable gateway.

On the bright side, the reduction in free liquidity will mean more opportunity to provide liquidity at a profit.

[mmeijeri]

A clear warning in the user interface would also help. More explanation and warning in the online documentation and marketing materials would also be good.

[klee]

@ JoelKatz

As far as I know Bitstamp is not yet FinCen compliant.
How does this effect your business with them?

[klee]

Bump!