Ripple as a service (not coin)

[worldinacoin]

Ripple can be a service and coin and exchange, that is what they are trying to do, but they make it so complicated that it will not be easy for the typical consumer to use it.   Also the development seems painfully slow, we are still looking at their close Beta!

[Coinseeker]

Ripple can be a service and coin and exchange, that is what they are trying to do, but they make it so complicated that it will not be easy for the typical consumer to use it.   Also the development seems painfully slow, we are still looking at their close Beta!

Smart gateways will develop user friendly interfaces to simplify things for your average Paypal/Western Union user. I'm eager too...but patience Daniel-son.  The future is near.    

[Sukrim]

Ripple can be a service and coin and exchange, that is what they are trying to do, but they make it so complicated that it will not be easy for the typical consumer to use it.   Also the development seems painfully slow, we are still looking at their close Beta!

Well, behind the scenes quite a bit of development is going on so I would rather see it as a focus and communication problem in the sense of they need to focus on a certain feature that has widespread appeal (like the recently added Bitcoin bridge protocol) and communicating it far and wide.

I also would love to see more simple clients popping up, though that again might be a problem as client developers probalby want their own server at home to test against a running server. Also what would be really cool is to see someone use Bitcoin, Ripple or (maybe even better suited for this?) OpenTransactions transparently, meaning user accounts are secretly managed and trading on a live network but don't even necessarily need to know about this.

I find it highly hypocritical by the way from a centralized webwallet operator with no expressed intent to open source any of his services who actively paid people to advertise against Ripple to call others "paid shills".

Anyways, back to work - I need to compute some more ledgers!

[yvv]

Ripple can be a service and coin and exchange, that is what they are trying to do, but they make it so complicated that it will not be easy for the typical consumer to use it.   Also the development seems painfully slow, we are still looking at their close Beta!

It is not easy to understand how ripple work, but it is very easy to use it. Just fund your wallet with whatever currency you have through appropriate gateway, then make payments to any ripple address with the currency which receiver needs. It takes few clicks to setup yourself for using ripple.

[Coinseeker]

I find it highly hypocritical by the way from a centralized webwallet operator with no expressed intent to open source any of his services who actively paid people to advertise against Ripple to call others "paid shills".

Ha!     Learn something new everyday. 

[dancupid]

I think Ripple is an interesting idea, and that xrp are not really important (a distraction) - the problem is that it doesn't work.

Each gateway basically invents it's own currency - the value of that currency is tied to the trust people hold in that gateway. Since anyone can become a gateway then the trust in the gateway becomes exponentially less as more people add themselves to the chain of gateways.

Each $1, or bitcoin you hold in your ripple account is only as good as the tree of connections you have - some may be good, some may be reasonable and some may be worthless.

I hold 4 tradefortress bitcoins in my ripple account - I acknowledge they are worthless - but there's is no way I am going to add bitcoins from other gateways, because I don't know which bitcoins are real and which are bullshit.

I cannot trust my ripple account, so I cannot (I am unwilling) to use it.

[Coinseeker]

I think Ripple is an interesting idea, and that xrp are not really important (a distraction) - the problem is that it doesn't work.

Each gateway basically invents it's own currency - the value of that currency is tied to the trust people hold in that gateway. Since anyone can become a gateway then the trust in the gateway becomes exponentially less as more people add themselves to the chain of gateways.

Each $1, or bitcoin you hold in your ripple account is only as good as the tree of connections you have - some may be good, some may be reasonable and some may be worthless.

I hold 4 tradefortress bitcoins in my ripple account - I acknowledge they are worthless - but there's is no way I am going to add bitcoins from other gateways, because I don't know which bitcoins are real and which are bullshit.

I cannot trust my ripple account, so I cannot (I am unwilling) to use it.

It absolutely works.  It simply does what you tell it to do.  You told Ripple that you trusted Tradefortress for 4 of his worthless BTC's.  That's not a flaw in Ripple, that's a flaw in you for trusting someone you shouldn't have.  Accept responsibility for your own actions.  Ripple is not AI to make up for your lack of.

There are ways to deal with your worthless IOU's.  Reduce your trust level to Tradefortress to 0 and send those worthless IOU's back to the issuer. Or, you could just to start a new account and be wise in who you trust from now on.  Right now, Bitstamp is the only gateway I trust with any significant amount as do most Ripple users.  They issue IOU's based on the USD or BTC in my BitStamp account.  They don't "invent" currency.  

My advice is you should avoid using Ripple until you take the time to understand how it works.  That should be common sense but...some people don't like to read manuals.   

[Sukrim]

Anyone who still trusts TradeFortress on Ripple (especially the ~3-5 ppl. who still trust both him and BitStamp!) should simply send the BTC back to him and set the trust limit to 0.

[d4n13]

Wow... ok... that got more heated than I thought.  I will certainly step lightly when bringing up the 'R' word around here .

Nice, I personally work simply with the web socket client in Python and rippled, but it might help others.

@Sukrim, I did some porting efforts to my API tester.  Might want to check out the JavaScript port, it's pretty simple and easy since you can cut and past test JSON in one clean interface.

https://github.com/d4n13/ripple-ps-websocket/tree/master/ports

Enjoy... Now.. where is that d4mn lock button...

[Sukrim]

I use Websockets from firefox just fine - why the limit to Chrome?
Anyways, I run https://github.com/liris/websocket-client or just (for small/on-the-fly requests) use http://www.websocket.org/echo.html as a "web service" (actually it runs locally).

Ripple discussions tend to heat up a lot here anyways, this is almost civil in comparison!

[dancupid]

I think Ripple is an interesting idea, and that xrp are not really important (a distraction) - the problem is that it doesn't work.

Each gateway basically invents it's own currency - the value of that currency is tied to the trust people hold in that gateway. Since anyone can become a gateway then the trust in the gateway becomes exponentially less as more people add themselves to the chain of gateways.

Each $1, or bitcoin you hold in your ripple account is only as good as the tree of connections you have - some may be good, some may be reasonable and some may be worthless.

I hold 4 tradefortress bitcoins in my ripple account - I acknowledge they are worthless - but there's is no way I am going to add bitcoins from other gateways, because I don't know which bitcoins are real and which are bullshit.

I cannot trust my ripple account, so I cannot (I am unwilling) to use it.

It absolutely works.  It simply does what you tell it to do.  You told Ripple that you trusted Tradefortress for 4 of his worthless BTC's.  That's not a flaw in Ripple, that's a flaw in you for trusting someone you shouldn't have.  Accept responsibility for your own actions.  Ripple is not AI to make up for your lack of.

There are ways to deal with your worthless IOU's.  Reduce your trust level to Tradefortress to 0 and send those worthless IOU's back to the issuer. Or, you could just to start a new account and be wise in who you trust from now on.  Right now, Bitstamp is the only gateway I trust with any significant amount as do most Ripple users.  They issue IOU's based on the USD or BTC in my BitStamp account.  They don't "invent" currency.  

My advice is you should avoid using Ripple until you take the time to understand how it works.  That should be common sense but...some people don't like to read manuals.   

It's easier just to avoid it all together as you suggest - so that's my decision.
That's how I am going to take responsibility for my own actions.

[Peter Lambert]

I think ripple is an interesting idea, and there is potential for some sort of ripple system to work in the future. But I do not like the reliance on XRP, I think ripple would be better without them, and I find it unnerving how much information is available to everybody. I do not want just anybody to know every single transaction I have ever made, all conveniently linked in one place. I guess there are ways to hide your identity by using multiple accounts, but that totally disrupts the whole trust network and is not very convenient.

[d4n13]

It's easier just to avoid it all together as you suggest - so that's my decision.
That's how I am going to take responsibility for my own actions.

Yep, the little SimPeople magic "everything just works" videos they provided were really horrible.  Might as well said it runs on PixieDust.  Going through the wiki and writing code against it was the only way I really began to understand the system in any real sense.  In my opinion they would have been better comparing it to bank statements and checks.  Your ripple balance represents how much money you have at PlaceXYZ and you can use that money anywhere that takes checks from PlaceXYZ.  A very long time ago that used to be the way US banking worked.  I could buy groceries at the grocery store with a check, but only checks from the one big bank in town.

I think ripple is an interesting idea, and there is potential for some sort of ripple system to work in the future. But I do not like the reliance on XRP, I think ripple would be better without them, and I find it unnerving how much information is available to everybody. I do not want just anybody to know every single transaction I have ever made, all conveniently linked in one place. I guess there are ways to hide your identity by using multiple accounts, but that totally disrupts the whole trust network and is not very convenient.

Yeah... the whole bank analogy breaks down once you throw in "and BTW all your balances are visible to everyone".  This is simple enough for bitcoiners to grasp, but not soo much for civilians.
UPDATE: This can be fixed with "hot" and "cold" wallets, or in this case "public" and "private" addresses, but the last thing that is needed is another level of convolution.

I use Websockets from firefox just fine - why the limit to Chrome?

Not a limitation, just a preference.  Should work well with all browsers... even IE10 *puke*

Anyways, I run https://github.com/liris/websocket-client or just (for small/on-the-fly requests) use http://www.websocket.org/echo.html as a "web service" (actually it runs locally).

I like python fine, and will likely play with it too, just figured more people would like to see a javascript sample.  The echo page is cool too, but it doesn't provide the pointers mine does (like how to tip).  Neither of them handle cross-domain invocations.  Both chrome and firefox prevent that without reverting to lower level requests.  I've heard that the fix is to explicitly allow it on the webserver to avoid the errors, but few service providers allow that level of tweaking.  Might give this a shot as soon as I get enough NMC to start a .bit domain.

Ripple discussions tend to heat up a lot here anyways, this is almost civil in comparison!

Bummer ripple is so taboo here.  I had hoped to bring up some of my questions and thoughts to a larger community, but it sounds like I'll stick to the smaller ripple boards for the foreseeable future.

[Sukrim]

Bummer ripple is so taboo here.  I had hoped to bring up some of my questions and thoughts to a larger community, but it sounds like I'll stick to the smaller ripple boards for the foreseeable future.

Nah, it's ok - just make sure it is relevant for Bitcoin though, otherwise it'll end up in Alternative Cryptocurrency hell, alongside scamcoin number 1337.

I really like the check analogy by the way, Ripple then is just a way to conveniently exchange these according to published prices and manage them.
What did you mean with "private addresses" by the way to hide visible balances?

[d4n13]

What did you mean with "private addresses" by the way to hide visible balances?

Simple... You have two Addresses ripPriv and ripPub.

When you deposit your money at your gateway, you instruct them to send it to ripPriv.

When you ask people to send you money you instruct them to send it to ripPub.

You set trust from ripPub <=> ripPriv very high.

So when people look up your 'public' address, they will just see the contents of your 'tip jar' (ripPub).  They may deduce that you trust some account that is holding a large balance (ripPriv), but the gateways you trust likely have a large balance as well.  When you send money from ripPub or ripPriv they will simple ripple through each other.

Certainly not complete anonymity, more like zebra anonymity.

[Sukrim]

A gateway will have a lot of (currently dozens, in the future probably hundreds) of incoming trust lines and 0 outgoing ones. Mutual trust lines are really rare and would make these 2 accounts stick out a lot.

It might be part of some limited deniability scheme, certainly no anonymity though in my opinion.

[techsavver]

Nobody will use ripple, it is not anonymous and there is a fee to using multiple addresses. And you can't mix with trust lines.

Bitcoin with Scrypt would be perfect.

[Sukrim]

Well, a few thousand people do use Ripple and Scrypt or not, Bitcoin users can be deanonymized too.

Mixing might be possible with IOU redemption and reissuance (e.g. I send Bitstamp some BTC.Bitstamp and receive some USD.Bitstamp later, maybe to a different account), I haven't thought too much about XRP mixing.