Theymos: What the fuck is up with BFL and TradeFortress?

[Kaetemi]

Practically a trusted node should be any node where you can spend your currency for anything equally valued. This would be any trustworthy store or business that guarantees they accept the relevant currency through Ripple. Essentially, what you are then doing by trusting them, is investing in them with your trust granting them a possible debt (in case they indirectly spend the trust trough other paths) for future services. Anyone who is giving you money through Ripple should NEVER be trusted, with the exception of established gateways for physical currencies. When working with local currencies, you should ONLY trust those who can return you services for said currency, and preferably only for the amount that you expect to spend there in a reasonable future timespan.

[crumbcake]

Two people reply to me but neither actually addresses the argument I was making at all. You're welcome to make 800 different arguments, but it gets really tedious when you keep switching to another argument you don't actually believe every time I address the ones you made. Does anyone want to actually respond to this argument:

It's roughly comparable to proving that Bitcoin is broken by starting an exchange or web-based wallet and then running off with the money or tricking people into deleting their wallet files. It's a Luddite attack on Bitcoin, Ripple, and technology in general -- an attempt to prove that people are too stupid to have powerful tools.

HI JK,
This "Luddite Attack" is not quite as warrantless as your wording makes it appear.  After all, what's being discussed *is exactly how fit* a particular technology is for use as currency.  If i understand TF, his opinion is: It isn't.
Stick with me here.  Do you consider criticizing a handgun for not having a safety & shipping with a loaded clip a Luddite attack?  After all, releasing the safety takes time before the gun could be fired, making it a less powerful as tool?  Do you seriously feel that any critique of technology based on its possible misuse is invalid?  Even when the likelihood of such misuse is demonstrably ... well jeesh, endemic to everyone in TF's little troll 

[usagi]

I forget. How much are we paying to use this forum?

Well, I paid over six thousand dollars. And I don't get shit.

[Raoul Duke]

I forget. How much are we paying to use this forum?

Well, I paid over six thousand dollars. And I don't get shit.

No, you paid 50 BTC. Leave the dollars out of it, ok?
Oh, and btw, did anyone promised you anything in exchange for those 50 BTC you paid and didn't deliver on the promise?

[Matthew N. Wright]

I forget. How much are we paying to use this forum?

Well, I paid over six thousand dollars. And I don't get shit.

No, you paid 50 BTC. Leave the dollars out of it, ok?

Maybe he used Ripple

[crumbcake]

Calling Ripple a scam because you don't understand the how trust works is like calling SWIFT a scam because you opened a bank yesterday, convinced a bunch of other banks to trust you personally, issued a bunch of wire transfers to those banks, then refused to back them.

Starting a bank & joining SWIFT takes millions of dollars & a Kafkaesque legal maze to waddle through.  Issuing Ripple trust by anyone with a laptop?  Priceless.

[Matthew N. Wright]

Calling Ripple a scam because you don't understand the how trust works is like calling SWIFT a scam because you opened a bank yesterday, convinced a bunch of other banks to trust you personally, issued a bunch of wire transfers to those banks, then refused to back them.

Starting a bank & joining SWIFT takes millions of dollars & a Kafkaesque legal maze to waddle through.  Issuing Ripple trust by anyone with a laptop?  Priceless.

You don't need a laptop to issue trust. Trust is between human beings. You need a laptop to enter that trust into a ledger.

[crumbcake]

Calling Ripple a scam because you don't understand the how trust works is like calling SWIFT a scam because you opened a bank yesterday, convinced a bunch of other banks to trust you personally, issued a bunch of wire transfers to those banks, then refused to back them.

Starting a bank & joining SWIFT takes millions of dollars & a Kafkaesque legal maze to waddle through.  Issuing Ripple trust by anyone with a laptop?  Priceless.

You don't need a laptop to issue trust. Trust is between human beings. You need a laptop to enter that trust into a ledger.

I stand corrected.  You don't even need a laptop

[Deprived]

Two people reply to me but neither actually addresses the argument I was making at all. You're welcome to make 800 different arguments, but it gets really tedious when you keep switching to another argument you don't actually believe every time I address the ones you made. Does anyone want to actually respond to this argument:

It's roughly comparable to proving that Bitcoin is broken by starting an exchange or web-based wallet and then running off with the money or tricking people into deleting their wallet files. It's a Luddite attack on Bitcoin, Ripple, and technology in general -- an attempt to prove that people are too stupid to have powerful tools.

Well the direct answer to the 'argument' you're making is that it's NOT roughly comparable.  To address it in any more depth would be giving credibility to the strawman you constructed.

A roughly comparable situation would be if when you made a transfer of coins in Bitcoin the transaction contained your private key in plain-text by default - and you had to have access to closed-source source-code to change the settings to not broadcast it.  In my view that's how bad an idea valuing, by default, all debt equally (at a non-zero value) is.  The problem isn't that trust CAN be used to provide liquidity - it's that it does so by default.

Take a step back from the TF situation and consider what will happen when (and it WILL happen at some point) a gateway defaults.  Is it really desirable that whoever happens to be around gets to shift all their debt from it to whoever happens to be offline (assuming the system gains enough traction that there are actually a signficiant number of users trusting multiple gateways)?  Exposure to that kind of risk needs to be opted into by users (by them actively setting their trusted counterparties as exchangable) not something they have forced on them without warning the moment they trust more than one target.

[JoelKatz]

Stick with me here.  Do you consider criticizing a handgun for not having a safety & shipping with a loaded clip a Luddite attack?  After all, releasing the safety takes time before the gun could be fired, making it a less powerful as tool?  Do you seriously feel that any critique of technology based on its possible misuse is invalid?  Even when the likelihood of such misuse is demonstrably ... well jeesh, endemic to everyone in TF's little troll  

You're comparing apples to oranges. To make your analogy work, he'd have to be tricking people into shooting each other with that handgun rather than criticizing it.

A roughly comparable situation would be if when you made a transfer of coins in Bitcoin the transaction contained your private key in plain-text by default - and you had to have access to closed-source source-code to change the settings to not broadcast it.  In my view that's how bad an idea valuing, by default, all debt equally (at a non-zero value) is.  The problem isn't that trust CAN be used to provide liquidity - it's that it does so by default.

Take a step back from the TF situation and consider what will happen when (and it WILL happen at some point) a gateway defaults.  Is it really desirable that whoever happens to be around gets to shift all their debt from it to whoever happens to be offline (assuming the system gains enough traction that there are actually a signficiant number of users trusting multiple gateways)?  Exposure to that kind of risk needs to be opted into by users (by them actively setting their trusted counterparties as exchangable) not something they have forced on them without warning the moment they trust more than one target.

You're totally off the topic here. This isn't about microscopic design features of Ripple. He didn't criticize a design feature, make points for and against it, and convince people that the design has a defect that should be changed. He devised a scheme to exploit what he thinks is a defect that hurt real people. (And, by the way, rational people are having that rational argument elsewhere. We're already talking about different design changes to reduce this risk.)

[crumbcake]

Stick with me here.  Do you consider criticizing a handgun for not having a safety & shipping with a loaded clip a Luddite attack?  After all, releasing the safety takes time before the gun could be fired, making it a less powerful as tool?  Do you seriously feel that any critique of technology based on its possible misuse is invalid?  Even when the likelihood of such misuse is demonstrably ... well jeesh, endemic to everyone in TF's little troll  

You're comparing apples to oranges. To make your analogy work, he'd have to be tricking people into shooting each other with that handgun rather than criticizing it.

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack." 
And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?

[JoelKatz]

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack."

He's convincing people to hurt themselves with powerful technology as a way of arguing that people are too dumb to have that technology or the technology is bad because it enables people to hurt themselves. It's completely different from arguing that there should be better safeties or warnings.

For example, consider a hammer. A person can bash their thumb with a hammer. The Luddite argument is that because people can bash their thumb with a hammer, hammers are bad. Or, worse, convincing people to use hammers carelessly so you can show lots of pictures of black and blue thumbs to stop this scourge of evil hammers. It's not at all the same as arguing that because people can bash their thumbs with a hammer, people need to understand how to safely use hammers or that it might be worth investigating whether a hammer can be designed such that it's more difficult to hit your thumb.

And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?

No. I'm saying that technical criticism about insufficient safeties or warnings is in a completely different category from tricking people into doing things whose consequences they don't understand and that you know will cause harm.

[Matthew N. Wright]

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack."

He's convincing people to hurt themselves with powerful technology as a way of arguing that people are too dumb to have that technology or the technology is bad because it enables people to hurt themselves. It's completely different from arguing that there should be better safeties or warnings.

For example, consider a hammer. A person can bash their thumb with a hammer. The Luddite argument is that because people can bash their thumb with a hammer, hammers are bad. Or, worse, convincing people to use hammers carelessly so you can show lots of pictures of black and blue thumbs to stop this scourge of evil hammers. It's not at all the same as arguing that because people can bash their thumbs with a hammer, people need to understand how to safely use hammers or that it might be worth investigating whether a hammer can be designed such that it's more difficult to hit your thumb.

And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?

No. I'm saying that technical criticism about insufficient safeties or warnings is in a completely different category from tricking people into doing things whose consequences they don't understand and that you know will cause harm.

Basically TradeFortress is saying "HAMMERS ARE SCAMMERS" while telling everyone to hold out their fingers to prove it, and the dozens of newbies out of newbie jail with his paid signatures are repeating it. I really really really wish he'd stick to like 5 logical points and we could even make 5 threads for each one to keep things easy to follow, because Ripple is bigger than OpenCoin and it's much bigger than TradeFortress, and we really all should learn to get along without having to pay the forums for opportunities to libel to hide our ignorance of emerging technologies. The most sickening part is, he's acting the same way everyone in the non-bitcoin world acts about bitcoin and some bitcoiners here are hypocritically supporting it.

"Doesn't follow what I know and am used to? Can't figure out or just don't agree with how it works? SCAM!"

[malevolent]

I forget. How much are we paying to use this forum?

Well, I paid over six thousand dollars. And I don't get shit.

Looks like you paid about $350:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38071.msg1018222#msg1018222
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360zczsg2012-07-07zeg2012-07-10ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

edit: and you got (correct me if I'm wrong), no more, no less, but exactly what you were to be given for the 50 BTC donation.

[crumbcake]

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack."

He's convincing people to hurt themselves with powerful technology as a way of arguing that people are too dumb to have that technology or the technology is bad because it enables people to hurt themselves. It's completely different from arguing that there should be better safeties or warnings.

No. Everyone who joined his thread was told to, and did extend Ripple trust.  Please don't tell me the same people would just as willingly smash their thumbs with hammers or start blasting each other with guns.  You'll make me lose faith in humanity.

For example, consider a hammer. A person can bash their thumb with a hammer. The Luddite argument is that because people can bash their thumb with a hammer, hammers are bad.

1.
Perhaps.  Though TF's argument would be more along these lines:  If you offer a hammer to someone, telling him to bash his thumb with it, which he then proceeds to do with unwarranted abandon, that person is not a carpenter, and thus could only suffer from a hammer.  Something like that, but i'm just guessing.

Or, worse, convincing people to use hammers carelessly so you can show lots of pictures of black and blue thumbs to stop this scourge of evil hammers.

2.
Wait.  So he shouldn't teach through example & experience, and he shouldn't use pics?  What's he supposed to do?

It's not at all the same as arguing that because people can bash their thumbs with a hammer, people need to understand how to safely use hammers or that it might be worth investigating whether a hammer can be designed such that it's more difficult to hit your thumb.

3.
First, see (1).  Second, why should these innocents, who never asked for a hammer 'till one was shoved in their yet-unbloodied hands, want one?  The were perfectly content with using pushpins & stick-its 'till OpenCoin inc. came along and told them how cool & practical hammers are.  Surprise!

And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?

No. I'm saying that technical criticism about insufficient safeties or warnings is in a completely different category from tricking people into doing things whose consequences they don't understand and that you know will cause harm.

I just don't know how many times i can repeat the same thing:  No it is not.  If the people you speak of could be convinced, en masse, to start bashing their thumbs with the hammers you offer, I'd like to suggest that hammerin' life may not be the life for them.  Please keep them away from hammers, FFS!

edit: matching tags

[crumbcake]

Not at all.  Merely questioning exactly what makes TF's troll a "Luddite attack."

He's convincing people to hurt themselves with powerful technology as a way of arguing that people are too dumb to have that technology or the technology is bad because it enables people to hurt themselves. It's completely different from arguing that there should be better safeties or warnings.

For example, consider a hammer. A person can bash their thumb with a hammer. The Luddite argument is that because people can bash their thumb with a hammer, hammers are bad. Or, worse, convincing people to use hammers carelessly so you can show lots of pictures of black and blue thumbs to stop this scourge of evil hammers. It's not at all the same as arguing that because people can bash their thumbs with a hammer, people need to understand how to safely use hammers or that it might be worth investigating whether a hammer can be designed such that it's more difficult to hit your thumb.

And i'm not sure i get *your analogy.*  Are you suggesting that if you're going to let people use Ripple you might as well hand them a gun & tell them to shoot each other?

No. I'm saying that technical criticism about insufficient safeties or warnings is in a completely different category from tricking people into doing things whose consequences they don't understand and that you know will cause harm.

Basically TradeFortress is saying "HAMMERS ARE SCAMMERS" while telling everyone to hold out their fingers to prove it, and the dozens of newbies out of newbie jail with his paid signatures are repeating it.

No.  TF hasn't even mentioned hammers.  You're confusing him with JK, who likes the hammer analogy.  Only in his take on things, all the noobs are tripping over each other so they could get more hammers to bash their thumbs with.  Very agreeable bunch.

I really really really wish he'd stick to like 5 logical points and we could even make 5 threads for each one to keep things easy to follow, because Ripple is bigger than OpenCoin and it's much bigger than TradeFortress,

Not the ripple we're talking about, that bitch is tied right up to Open Coin's hitchin' post.

and we really all should learn to get along without having to pay the forums for opportunities to libel to hide our ignorance of emerging technologies. The most sickening part is, he's acting the same way everyone in the non-bitcoin world acts about bitcoin and some bitcoiners here are hypocritically supporting it.

WUT

"Doesn't follow what I know and am used to? Can't figure out or just don't agree with how it works? SCAM!"

Focus!

[Deprived]

Stick with me here.  Do you consider criticizing a handgun for not having a safety & shipping with a loaded clip a Luddite attack?  After all, releasing the safety takes time before the gun could be fired, making it a less powerful as tool?  Do you seriously feel that any critique of technology based on its possible misuse is invalid?  Even when the likelihood of such misuse is demonstrably ... well jeesh, endemic to everyone in TF's little troll  

You're comparing apples to oranges. To make your analogy work, he'd have to be tricking people into shooting each other with that handgun rather than criticizing it.

A roughly comparable situation would be if when you made a transfer of coins in Bitcoin the transaction contained your private key in plain-text by default - and you had to have access to closed-source source-code to change the settings to not broadcast it.  In my view that's how bad an idea valuing, by default, all debt equally (at a non-zero value) is.  The problem isn't that trust CAN be used to provide liquidity - it's that it does so by default.

Take a step back from the TF situation and consider what will happen when (and it WILL happen at some point) a gateway defaults.  Is it really desirable that whoever happens to be around gets to shift all their debt from it to whoever happens to be offline (assuming the system gains enough traction that there are actually a signficiant number of users trusting multiple gateways)?  Exposure to that kind of risk needs to be opted into by users (by them actively setting their trusted counterparties as exchangable) not something they have forced on them without warning the moment they trust more than one target.

You're totally off the topic here. This isn't about microscopic design features of Ripple. He didn't criticize a design feature, make points for and against it, and convince people that the design has a defect that should be changed. He devised a scheme to exploit what he thinks is a defect that hurt real people. (And, by the way, rational people are having that rational argument elsewhere. We're already talking about different design changes to reduce this risk.)

I think he did a pretty good job of achieving the emboldened.

I pointed out that particular issue ages ago - explaining that just because I (ripple) trust A and B doesn't mean I'm fine with debt from one being exchanged for debt from the other.  That just got ignored - seems his approach had more success in highlighting the issue.

And are you seriously claiming that the ability to ripple debts is a "microscopic design feature" of ripple?  I thought that was pretty much the whole point of it (either that or making profit by selling XRPs).  And the way it currently works is horribly broken.

To take your gun analogy it's as if you'd designed a gun where if you pointed it in the general direction of someone it automatically fired without the trigger needing to be pulled.  And the safety catch was proprietary and not available to the public - only an inner circle got one of those.

Similarly your hammer analogy is incorrect.  You've designed a hammer where it's impossible to hit a nail (maintain extended trust to multiple people) without hitting your fingers (allow equal-value exchange of debt you've accepted even when that debt is NOT of equal value).  It's not about failure to understand how to use the tool - it's that, right now, the tool can't do what it's meant to do safely (If you have unused trust extended then you CAN'T stop it being used in exchange for existing debt you hold).  It's not that you CAN hit your finger - it's that it's impossible to avoid it.

If you're working on a solution to that problem don't fall into the tempting trap of just allowing assignment of value or weight to individual debtors - that would be a more subtly broken solution.  By that I mean a solution where if I trusted A and B and C I could assign a weight of 1 to A and 0.9 to B and 0.01 to C - and any ripples through me would apply the appropriate rates (so someone would have to give me 100 C BTC to get 1 A BTC or 10 B BTC to get 9 A BTC).  It's an obvious way to do it - but wrong.

I like the concept behind ripple.  I'm not so keen on some of the decisions made in your implementation.  Not just technical details like this one but basic things like trying to get sympathy/support by claiming to be open-source whilst not being open-source at all (I assume you realise that a vague promise of becoming open-source at an unspecified time in the future isn't the same thing as being open-source).  Any claims that you are open-source would be lies wouldn't they?

[Kouye]

...

That's fair.
Now can you just comment those simple facts ?

1 - TF wants to prove ripple is a scam platform - which I agree with.
2 - He goes all out on the forum.
3 - Some people still remain dubious.
4 - To prove those dubious people wrong, he decides to make a 'social experiment'
5 - He posts an offer in the newbie section to demonstrate the ripple flaws.
6 - Newbies who might not ever heard of ripple before loose BTC.
7 - Previous dubious people are convinced. But They of course, wouldn't have fallen for TF offer.

TLDR: Randow newbies paid so that TF can prove dubious people who beleived in Ripple wrong.
I sincerly would have no problem if the random newbies were the same as the Ripple defenders.

But they're not.

[Deprived]

...

That's fair.
Now can you just comment those simple facts ?

1 - TF wants to prove ripple is a scam platform - which I agree with.
2 - He goes all out on the forum.
3 - Some people still remain dubious.
4 - To prove those dubious people wrong, he decides to make a 'social experiment'
5 - He posts an offer in the newbie section to demonstrate the ripple flaws.
6 - Newbies who might not ever heard of ripple before loose BTC.
7 - Previous dubious people are convinced. But They of course, wouldn't have fallen for TF offer.

TLDR: Randow newbies paid so that TF can prove dubious people who beleived in Ripple wrong.
I sincerly would have no problem if the random newbies were the same as the Ripple defenders.

But they're not.

I agree that what he did was possibly stupid and definitely risked people losing money.

But this thread was accusing him of scamming - which isn't the case.

And the risk already existed - my view is, in part, that it was better he did it WITHOUT trying to scam people than someone did it in a more subtle way causing significant loss.  The issue's been around (and been commented on) since ripple was first promoted in the alt-currencies forum.  There was no sign of any attempt to fix it - or even an acknowledgement that there was a problem.  So I tend to think this episode will end up doing way more good than harm - the good being both a much greater general awareness of the flaw/risk with ripple trust and hopefully a bit more urgency from the ripple team to do something about it.  The bad seems to be a loss of 1 BTC or so plus maybe a further 10 BTC from someone who insisted on losing it to prove a point that we already all knew (point proven - hope it was worth 10 BTC).

[themusicgod1]

Not the ripple we're talking about, that bitch is tied right up to Open Coin's hitchin' post.

Should be ppinted out the oyher ripple flavour (cmb) is making headlines this week.  Opencoin is only one player in a much bigger space, currently.