ripple is a closed source premined coin that is centrally hosted and controlled.
the owners of ripple own half of all xrp. so it is quite an epic premine.
one aspect of ripple is that is has a "money is debt" system embedded. that is the "trust" page in the ripple wallet.
the other novel thing about ripple is the ability to embed exchanges into the wallet, which you should check out if you haven't seen. they call them "gateways" which makes no fucking sense to me.
i am interested in buying them to immediately resell for higher and increase my btc holdings.
The ripple people have said they will open source once they get a bit farther along in the project.
Ripple is not mined, therefore there is no "premine". The creators of ripple control most of the XRP, but XRP is not meant to be an investment and you do not need very many of them. Just get enough to make it work and then ignore them. I like to think of them something like postage stamps, you buy a bunch and then you can send out your checks. So with 1 XRP you can send out something like 10000 transactions, each transaction can contain an arbitrary amount of BTC, USD, or whatever currency you like to use.
They call them "gateways" because they allow you to move money in and out of the Ripple system. Say you have some USD and you want to put it on the ripple system for whatever reason (maybe you want to pay somebody using ripple). You first deposit the money with the gateway, then they send you some GatewayUSD on Ripple. You can then use Ripple to send those GatewayUSD to the guy you owe money to. Or, if you receive GatewayUSD on Ripple, you can send those to the gateway and withdraw real USD. So the gateway lets people put money in and out of Ripple, seems like a sensible name to me.
But seriously-can someone please explain to me what Ripple is? Why do people want them? I have an idea, but I am looking for a concise explanation.
Are you asking what Ripple is (the system), or what ripples are (XRP, the currency)?
It is like asking "can somebody explain what bitcoin is? Why do people want them?"
Bitcoin is a system for storing and sending value, denominated in BTC, over the internet. People want BTC because they are worth something, and some people think they will be worth more in the future.
Ripple is a system for storing and sending credit over the internet, denominated in USD, BTC, AUD, FAV, BER, etc, and also value denominated in XRP. People want XRP because they allow you to use that system, and they are worth something, and some people think they might be worth more in the future.
