Why Ripple™ is against everything Bitcoin

[Micon]

I have tried at length to understand Ripple. 

I do not understand it at all.  I watched all the videos.  I can't figure out how I would trade btc for USD with it, something I assume it would do easily. 

It seems like a lot of branding, a lot of nice slides, 100B of a new crypto, centralized, I don't see what the buzz is about, this thing ain't gonna get off the ground IMO

[ihsotas]

I have tried at length to understand Ripple. 

I do not understand it at all.  I watched all the videos.  I can't figure out how I would trade btc for USD with it, something I assume it would do easily. 

It seems like a lot of branding, a lot of nice slides, 100B of a new crypto, centralized, I don't see what the buzz is about, this thing ain't gonna get off the ground IMO

I think Ripple/Opencoin has the worst technical writers of almost any Series A startup I've seen. Trying to piece together a clear explanation for how it works has required synthesizing various pages from their site (complete with two FAQS -- https://ripple.com/faq/ and https://ripple.com/wiki/FAQ), as well as surfing this and other forums/blogs to find David Schwartz / "Joel Katz" explaining in little pieces what's going on -- and I still can't say that I get it. The various metaphors on their site ("http for money!") sound like a marketing drone's language, not by and for developers.

At the same time, I believe that they are trying to solve many of the major problems with Bitcoin breaking into the mainstream, so I plan to meet the developers at the conference this weekend and see if they can provide the Grand Unified Theory of Ripple.

[lixiaolai]

bank is against everything gold.

[JoelKatz]

I do not understand it at all.  I watched all the videos.  I can't figure out how I would trade btc for USD with it, something I assume it would do easily.  

First, the BTC has to be in your Ripple account. If it's not, use a gateway to withdraw to Ripple.

We don't have a "pay to self" link or conversion wizard yet, so there's an extra step:

1 ) You open the client.

2 ) You log into your account.

3 ) You select 'Send'.

4 ) If you added yourself to your contact list as "self", type "self" for the destination account. Otherwise, paste your own account in.

5 ) Enter the amount of USD you want to buy. Select USD from the currency dropdown.

6 ) Wait a few seconds for the pathfinding engine to find the best deal it can for you using all the liquidity in the Ripple network.

7 ) If the number of BTC it says it will cost you sounds good to you, push 'Send'.

8 ) In about four seconds, your BTC will be gone and your Ripple account will now have USD.

You now have USD in your Ripple account. If you want it elsewhere, withdraw from Ripple.

[hashman]

I do not understand it at all.  I watched all the videos.  I can't figure out how I would trade btc for USD with it, something I assume it would do easily.  

We don't have a "pay to self" link or conversion wizard yet, so there's an extra step:

1 ) You open the client.

Lost me already.   Are you talking about pointing a browser to ripple.com/client ?

[cypherdoc]

I do not understand it at all.  I watched all the videos.  I can't figure out how I would trade btc for USD with it, something I assume it would do easily.  

We don't have a "pay to self" link or conversion wizard yet, so there's an extra step:

1 ) You open the client.

Lost me already.   Are you talking about pointing a browser to ripple.com/client ?

lol, and you're only at step 1!

this is what ihsotas was talking about...

...Joel has me lost too.

[jbreher]

Are my questions too basic? Too obscure? Too repetitive? I really have been looking, but I've not found what seem to me to be answers to the questions below:

Neither shill nor premine screamer, I am one of the hopefully still rational trying to understand the implications behind Ripple. Allow me some continued discussion...

Source code is not "open", you can do what you want in your closed code and nobody can really control you (except governments of course).

Not true. All ledgers are public, and signed by us. All differences between ledgers must be justified by a transaction signed by the account that issued it. All transactions are public and each transaction includes the precise "delta" is applied to the ledger. We can't just do whatever we want.

This is a point I have missed until now - "All ledgers are public and signed by us." While public ledgers seem on the surface a good thing [assuming that fine-grained pseudonymity is still available], I would like to focus upon the "signed by us" portion. Shall I assume that "us" is OpenCoin? Now and forever? Now until some future unspecified eventuality occurs? Is this not then a centralized point of attack?

Also, because you are not Open Source, governments can shut you down at any given time they want.

The code would automatically become open source if that happens. Developers have that in their contract and any number of people have the source code and understand these terms. I've discussed the contingency plans for that case several times, I think at least once in this very thread.

Similar to misterbigg, this struck me as new information. What plans are in place for this to happen? While I do not doubt that an intent has been discussed and generally assented to, there are a litany of chances for failure from that position to actual concrete plans, with M of N safeguards, clearly defined trigger points, and failsafe and backup mechanisms. I'm sure we'll all recall that Pirate and GLBSE claimed to have such plans in place. A public disclosure of the specific plans would likely go a long way of easing at least this particular doubt in the minds of many. If you truly discussed this in this very thread, it must have been disclosed only very obliquely. Or perhaps I (and demonstrably at least one other) were sleeping during that portion of the thread.

...As I catch up with the thread's head, I ran across this...

why you think there is a consensus mechanism that actually carries weight in a decision making process moreso than just being able to view balances and transactions on a gateways ledger (which i think is a long shot feature especially if we're talking about banks).

Each validator signs the consensus ledger each time a new one is created. So you have a set of cryptographic signatures for each ledger produced by a large number of independently-operated validators, none of which gets to choose the rules by which new ledgers are created from prior ledgers. Further, the ledgers contain hash chains which lead to prior ledgers and signed transactions that justify the changes between them. Also important -- the gateways don't get to choose the rules by which transactions are executed, nor can they make exceptions to them.

Are the "us" in "All ledgers are public and signed by us" above actually the validators? Who are the validators? And what makes them able to judge what is and what is not a valid transaction? Can anyone be a validator? What is the criteria?

As far as the "rules by which new ledgers are created from prior ledgers", are these rules encoded in immutable protocol? Or are the subject to change over time? And if the latter, who can participate in these rule changes?

Last in the above, what happens if a gateway refuses to honor their previous commitment to carry out all transactions on a non-discretionary basis? Would this be synonymous with refusal to honor their IOUs? What if a gateway becomes insolvent?

[GoWest]

I can't believe Google Ventures and IDG Capital Partners (a $2.5 billion fund) just invested in OpenCoin. Man, these guys are pulling the wool over everyone's eyes! </sarcasm> 

[ihsotas]

Are my questions too basic? Too obscure? Too repetitive? I really have been looking, but I've not found what seem to me to be answers to the questions below:

<snip>

All good questions as far as I can tell. I'm especially curious about this source code escrow revelation (and the actual mechanics of that), as well as the basic question of what OpenCoin means by 'soon':

"[Ripple] will be fully open sourced soon, so anyone can build on top of it."  (https://ripple.com/how-ripple-works/)

AFAICT they would gain far more in credibility by releasing it now than they might lose in community whiplash when they push from one alpha release to the next (and breaking a bunch of stuff in the process). With all the recent investment activity (a16z last month, now Google Ventures), you'd think they would want to use the PR spike to cement mindshare rather than raise more questions. David Schwartz has been really good about trying to answer questions (here and elsewhere), but it seems like he's their one-man army, and there's a backlog of concerns building up....

[solex]

"[Ripple] will be fully open sourced soon, so anyone can build on top of it."  (https://ripple.com/how-ripple-works/)

AFAICT they would gain far more in credibility by releasing it now than they might lose in community whiplash when they push from one alpha release to the next (and breaking a bunch of stuff in the process). With all the recent investment activity (a16z last month, now Google Ventures), you'd think they would want to use the PR spike to cement mindshare rather than raise more questions. David Schwartz has been really good about trying to answer questions (here and elsewhere), but it seems like he's their one-man army, and there's a backlog of concerns building up....

Ripple will never be open source. Not with major investors sitting at the boardroom table who want to protect their intellectual property.

[datz]

"[Ripple] will be fully open sourced soon, so anyone can build on top of it."  (https://ripple.com/how-ripple-works/)

AFAICT they would gain far more in credibility by releasing it now than they might lose in community whiplash when they push from one alpha release to the next (and breaking a bunch of stuff in the process). With all the recent investment activity (a16z last month, now Google Ventures), you'd think they would want to use the PR spike to cement mindshare rather than raise more questions. David Schwartz has been really good about trying to answer questions (here and elsewhere), but it seems like he's their one-man army, and there's a backlog of concerns building up....

Ripple will never be open source. Not with major investors sitting at the boardroom table who want to protect their intellectual property.

Ripple will open source because open source is vital to garnering trust and facilitating adoption of the Ripple protocol.

[nameface]

Ripple will never be open source. Not with major investors sitting at the boardroom table who want to protect their intellectual property.

Their intellectual property won't have much value until Ripple goes open source. Duh.

[cdog]

Ive read some outrageous things on here, but thats ridiculous and if someone is paying 5BTC to slander Ripple, then I should get like 50BTC.

I totally agree with you, cdog. You're the undisputed king of slandering Ripple.

Wait...you do realize that "slander" means to make false statements about a person/entity, right?

No actually I didnt and I misused that word. I thought slander was a synonym for defame, its not, shame on me.

My goal is to defame ripple, expose it for what it is, a for-profit scheme, which if not technically a scam or pyramid, offers no real utility.

Ripple has 3 major issues: Its not decentralized (a huge security flaw), the currency it uses was issued and not mined (OpenCoin can simply issue themselves more), and interest free debt has a negative expectation (as someone who has loaned a lot of juice-free dough to friends, I can speak to this personally).

I think Ripple brings a lot of interesting ideas to the table, but its implementation of those ideas is terribly flawed to the point of making it worthless.

I dont see how it can possibly have a longterm future, so my goal is to help people educate themselves about this reality, so rather than putting time, effort, and their hard earned income into supporting it, direct them towards BTC and LTC, which I believe strongly will both be around for many years - at least until someone is able to create something better, like perhaps Netcoin, but thats still in early development...

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Ripple will never be open source. Not with major investors sitting at the boardroom table who want to protect their intellectual property.

Their intellectual property won't have much value until Ripple goes open source. Duh.

I for one will not trust any "open" currency which is open only in name.
I want to have the sources so i can confirm it does what it does. I will not trust a good word from the producer.

Lying on their main site & wiki completely crosses out the whole Ripple thing to me. They are not to be trusted if they LIE from day one, damnit !

[Taz]

Ripple could potentially blow bitcoin out of the water mass acceptance wise simply because it's sleeker and more user friendly, which is a huge bonus for the average person, while keeping things pretty much the same as they are now.
That being said I don't really see anything to hold against Opencoin, they're just doing business.
Ripple is still being developed, why demand to see something that's not even finished yet?

[SGExodus]

Joel,

I suggest that you, being a staff of opencoin, should stop lurking on the forum, and spend more time fixing information on Ripple official webpage/Wiki.

The information there is utterly rubbish and cannot convince anyone that Ripple is genuinely offering a "revolutionizes payment" system [words from their wiki page]

The only people that are advocating Ripple are those that have received large amount of free XRP, and are trying to scam the rest into buying them at inflated rate.

No one have yet to articulate the real value of going through the Ripple workflow of fiat->ripple->transaction->ripple->fiat.  Ripple have not even proof convincingly that by going through all this extra hassle, the transaction fee will be cheaper than the 2% transaction fee that Visa charge today.

Ripple may not be intended as a scam, but all the manipulation of XRP prices right now, are making the company looking highly suspicious.

Good luck to those idiot VCs who put in their money based on how little information Ripple had published.  
 

[ShadowOfHarbringer]

Ripple is still being developed, why demand to see something that's not even finished yet?

I'm actually mad because of their insolent lying, not because of the closed source.

If somebody want's to do closed source, that is OK with me - I don't have to use it. But if somebody produces something closed and tries to sell it as Open Source, then something is seriously wrong.

[lexxus]

The only people that are advocating Ripple are those that have received large amount of free XRP, and are trying to scam the rest into buying them at inflated rate.

I have a feeling that it's vice versa: most of the people who are claiming that Ripple is scam are those who want to buy large amount of XRP, and are trying to scam the rest into selling them at a low rate by promoting FUD.

[🏰 TradeFortress 🏰]

The only people that are advocating Ripple are those that have received large amount of free XRP, and are trying to scam the rest into buying them at inflated rate.

I have a feeling that it's vice versa: most of the people who are claiming that Ripple is scam are those who want to buy large amount of XRP, and are trying to scam the rest into selling them at a low rate.

100 btc if I (as a person) ever tries to buy a single ripple. My word is my bond.

By the use of vice versa, you're thinking people who think Ripple are a scam are advocating Ripple?

[lexxus]

Good luck to those idiot VCs who put in their money based on how little information Ripple had published.  

Yeah, sure. Google Ventures and IDG’s investment are idiot VCs and invested after 15 minutes of reading ripple.com/wiki. They should have read this thread before. Stupid capitalists.