Ripple XRP ? What are they & who are Opencoin - Video
Crypto Currency Payment Network Ripple ( XRP ) A-Z: Is a payment network first and a crypto currency second. Pretty much the opposite as you'd look at Bitcoin, Litcoin, Primecoin or Feathercoin or any other alt-coin. Where the currency is first and the payment network is secondary. If you remember the days before SMTP, users could only send email to people within their email network. Like AOL -> AOL. with the SMTP protocol we now can send email to any email address.
Ripple is the same type of protocol but for payment networks. The banks have a network, Paypal has a network and crypto currencies each have a network. The problem is, they don't really work very well together. Ripple is a protocol to federate all payment networks just like SMTP did with email.
Here's a quick video:
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