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April 28, 2013, 10:13:48 AM |
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Ripple as a concept as a peer-to-peer credit/lending network or digital hawala has been around since 2004 and as such is certainly not a scam.
There are also (partial) implementations by different people e.g. at classic.ripplepay.com or villages.cc
The XRP currency doesn't have much to do with this original concept.
The implementation at ripple.com by OpenCoin Inc promises to be more distributed once the server code has been opened, but certainly it's problematic that they start off in a more centralized manner. But the network will be able to work without any central authority like OpenCoin Inc behind it.
The XRP currency in this implementation just exists, "because they can", and are to be seen like post office stamps. A little amount of them is required for every transaction for anti-spam and security reasons, and they will be destroyed (not flow to OpenCoin Inc or anyone else).
I wouldn't say it's a scam, they're very open about their business model. Satoshi effectively "pre-mined" a lot of coins for himself as well, so with ripple.com it's just more official. They want to do without proof-of-work and mining because they think it's wasteful, their consensus algorithm doesn't require it, so the only way to issue their XRPs is by giving them away.
Bitcoin and the Ripple XRPs may compete in a way, but one thing that Bitcoin can do what XRPs can't is enable much more privacy. You'd mostly only have one Ripple account or address, so all your balances will be pretty much out in the open. Many privacy-unaware folks who already put everything on Facebook etc probably don't care much about this though.
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