Is Ripple a scam?

[viboracecata]

I think not, more promotion needed for this idea.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Ripple devs control 50% of all coins. Someone will launch "non-premined" version and grab almost 100% of userbase. And then original Ripple will die.

And how will this "non-premined" thing is going to happen?

Creators of a clone will give away 100% of the coins.

This is not that simple to do.

This issue was discussed on ripple forum. It is not easy to come up with automated way to distribute coins which guarantees a fair distribution. So, evidently OpenCoin gave up on this problem, and decided to do it centralized way. If you come up with a good distribution method, go ahead, make a ripple clone, I will switch to it.

The key point is to distribute ALL coins, no matter how u choose whom to give the money. A "non-premined" Ripple clone will be much more popular and will kill the original Ripple. That's why they won't publish the sources. Dixi.

[Etlase2]

OpenCoin's system is to award themselves 100 billion XRP, and distribute and sell 80 billion of these over time. I personally do not understand why people would object to this.

Probably because there is a missing 20 billion to account for. What can possibly be the purpose of retaining so much XRP if not to exert control?

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

I prefer the term "ploy." They are too clever to make it technically a scam, knowing how vigilant bitcoiners are to outright direct scamming. Instead it is misleadingly closed-source, centralized, and neutered by OpenCoin's cynical and transparent money grab - a crippled ripple.

It lures people in with glitzy marketing and strings them along with promises of "fair" distribution of "worthless" XRP, open-sourcing, and decentralization, but the tiniest bit of investigation reveals the contradictions, the carefully tuned deceptiveness, the straw-grasping in argumentation, the spin-doctoring of deal-breaking issues, and the emptiness and needlessness of OC's free-floating promises.

If OC actually fully open sources all the code within a year and it turns out to be decentralized, I'll be happy to eat my words, but I believe the chances of that happening are slim to none. They might open the code in some token way, but I suspect there will always be a catch. After a while you develop a nose for dodgy intentions, and OCripple reeks to high heaven.

[Come-from-Beyond]

I prefer the term "ploy." They are too clever to make it technically a scam, knowing how vigilant bitcoiners are to outright direct scamming. Instead it is misleadingly closed-source, centralized, and neutered by OpenCoin's cynical and transparent money grab - a crippled ripple.

It lures people in with glitzy marketing and strings them along with promises of "fair" distribution of "worthless" XRP, open-sourcing, and decentralization, but the tiniest bit of investigation reveals the contradictions, the carefully tuned deceptiveness, the straw-grasping in argumentation, the spin-doctoring of deal-breaking issues, and the emptiness and needlessness of OC's free-floating promises.

If OC actually fully open sources all the code within a year and it turns out to be decentralized, I'll be happy to eat my words, but I believe the chances of that happening are slim to none. They might open the code in some token way, but I suspect there will always be a catch. After a while you develop a nose for dodgy intentions, and OCripple reeks to high heaven.

+1

[Galahad]

Is open source necessarily control over the source though? Even if they Open Source it what's to stop them from not fixing issues raised by the community or of just keeping it to themselves? I'm not saying they will necessarily do this.

54 votes, not bad.

[Sukrim]

I wanted to plug in various currencies, or as it were permit various currencies to plug in by making gateways for various currencies, but so far that still is being put off seemingly indefinitely.

-MarkM-

Did you contact OpenCoin on that matter? Providing assistance for new gateways is among their highest priority tasks.

Only via forum posts basically. I am not looking to get some special foot in the door of a closed source system, what I had been about to do was to modify the gateway code per each of several coin types as free open source gateway code for a bunch of coins, based on the free open source gateway code already available in the samples collection.

However in addition to learning that people would not be able to use the gateway code due to unavailability of the rippled code, I also was told that actually the gateway code itself isn't suitable for real use, so all in all it seemed it was too early yet for people to start putting up gateways.

It also turned out that using other people's rippled means revealing your 'secret' to them, that was the biggest reason in fact for the absolute need to run a rippled of one's own.

So all in all it was a long way from being ready for people to start realistically using.

Before starting to adapt the gateway to more currencies for example, it needs to be robust enough for real production use.

Presumably the gateways online so far are either flaky code, not suitable for use, or had failed to submit pull requests of their fixes, or were straight-out proprietary systems from the get-go.

-MarkM-

You can sign transactions offline and never need to expose your secrets to a rippled instance. Running your own "signing" rippled locally only saves you from re-implementing https://github.com/ripple/ripple-lib/blob/develop/bin/rsign.js, that's all. The way to construct and sign a transaction is outlined at https://ripple.com/wiki/Constructing_a_transaction, how to get it to the network is outlined at https://ripple.com/wiki/Robustly_submitting_a_transaction. You can take the fully signed transaction and submit it to any rippled out there that is networked, also the one operated by e.g. Bitstamp if you mistrust OpenCoin's public servers.

Gateways are Ripple clients basically, not servers. You can run a gateway just fine against any rippled out there, the upside to running your own is that you have a node under your control for sure, have a voice in the voting process and can be sure if something fails that it was most likely your fault, not a random server on the net suddenly failing.

The way to contact OpenCoin to get access to rippled sources is not via forum PMs, you need to send a mail to partners@ripple.com, as outlined on https://ripple.com/wiki/Rippled. Most gateways I know do develop their own codebase though to interface their systems with Ripple, the code that is published as example might really be more of an example than being used anywhere in the wild.

[markm]

The gateway code wasn't signing, if I recall correctly, thus required a rippled of one's own in order to use it.

Since it looks more and more like the thing is never really going to be open source I get less and less interested over time in wasting any time trying to hack up stuff to work with it.

If it ever actually does become open source I will have another look at it then, in the meantime it seems like being a timesink could be yet another aspect of its slick little trap/trick/cleverness.

By then maybe interfacing with it won't be needed at all, afterall already there is a bridge to bitcoin so one might as well just stick to bitcoin and if customers want to use Ripple tell them oh yeah great no problem, send real on the blockchain bitcoins using Ripple, that is fine...

-MarkM-

[JonHolmquist]

Ripple devs control 50% of all coins. Someone will launch "non-premined" version and grab almost 100% of userbase. And then original Ripple will die.

And how will this "non-premined" thing is going to happen?

Creators of a clone will give away 100% of the coins.

This is not that simple to do.

This issue was discussed on ripple forum. It is not easy to come up with automated way to distribute coins which guarantees a fair distribution. So, evidently OpenCoin gave up on this problem, and decided to do it centralized way. If you come up with a good distribution method, go ahead, make a ripple clone, I will switch to it.

The key point is to distribute ALL coins, no matter how u choose whom to give the money. A "non-premined" Ripple clone will be much more popular and will kill the original Ripple. That's why they won't publish the sources. Dixi.

IMO the value isn't in who owns the XRP. XRP isn't really geared to be a commodity like Bitcoin is.

The true value is in the gateways that get signed up on that network.

I think this concept can also be applied to Bitcoin. If PayPal started a straight up replica Bitcoin altcoin tomorrow and extended easy money in-money out options, how long would Bitcoin remain popular? Even if PayPal premined a good amount.

Anyways, I await the open sourcing. I'd love to see which theory proves true!

[Sukrim]

Yeah, I can understand that, though having the ability to run your own rippled and/or to look at its code is not that much of a game-changer to be honest.

Hiring someone whose sole responsibility consists of getting the code ready for opening the code for the public and stating numerous times that they will open the server code (most recent discussion with them: https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3602, 2 weeks ago) is not enough for you?

What would you need rippled code for exactly that would help you to develop gateway code and logic (other than peace of mind that you have the theoretical ability to run one on your own and that you could verify the inner workings and algorithms are actually working as documented on the wiki)?

[AmazonStuff]

Ripple devs control 50% of all coins. Someone will launch "non-premined" version and grab almost 100% of userbase. And then original Ripple will die.

And how will this "non-premined" thing is going to happen?

Creators of a clone will give away 100% of the coins.

This is not that simple to do.

This issue was discussed on ripple forum. It is not easy to come up with automated way to distribute coins which guarantees a fair distribution. So, evidently OpenCoin gave up on this problem, and decided to do it centralized way. If you come up with a good distribution method, go ahead, make a ripple clone, I will switch to it.

The key point is to distribute ALL coins, no matter how u choose whom to give the money. A "non-premined" Ripple clone will be much more popular and will kill the original Ripple. That's why they won't publish the sources. Dixi.

IMO the value isn't in who owns the XRP. XRP isn't really geared to be a commodity like Bitcoin is.

The true value is in the gateways that get signed up on that network.

I think this concept can also be applied to Bitcoin. If PayPal started a straight up replica Bitcoin altcoin tomorrow and extended easy money in-money out options, how long would Bitcoin remain popular? Even if PayPal premined a good amount.

Anyways, I await the open sourcing. I'd love to see which theory proves true!

Guys, please welcome the newest member of the OpenCoin team for sharing his thoughts with us.
Thank you Jon!

[markm]

What would you need rippled code for exactly that would help you to develop gateway code and logic (other than peace of mind that you have the theoretical ability to run one on your own and that you could verify the inner workings and algorithms are actually working as documented on the wiki)?

I wasn't looking to develop gateway code and logic, I was looking to s/bitcoin/devcoin/, s/8333/####/, s/BTC/DVC/ type stuff, that is basically to clone a working gateway giving it a different port number to connect to for a coin daemon so that it would be a gateway for some other coin than bitcoin, so people could run devcoin, geistgeld, coiledcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin, i0coin etc etc etc gateways just as easily as bitcoin gateways.

Now that a bitcoin bridge exists, I would want to do the same to that code, to spawn bridges for coins other than bitcoin.

And so on.

In other words the usual things one can do with normal open source stuff.

-MarkM-

[Sukrim]

Well, that's possible right now and does not require you to run your own rippled.

Most likely you would need to develop against the https://ripple.com/wiki/Services_API and having more people actively developing bridges other than Bitstamp would be actually a great thing to have.

The code for this is NOT part of rippled though, so it either is not in OpenCoin's hands at all or just not existing. All you could do with rippled sources is to verify what happens internally once you send requests though these APIs.

[markm]

What made rippled necessary was the fact that gateway code assumed you control the rippled it communicates with, that is, it did not encrypt your secret.

Maybe the latest gateway and bridge code does encrypt so no longer needs you to run your own rippled, if so great. If it is reasonably stable maybe it is ready for use with other coins by changing the port number the coin name etc... If not I guess its not time yet to base other coin gateways on the prototype built for bitcoin.

Its just that last time I actually tried to go get a gateway to change which coin it gateways too, the prototype gateway was not yet really working well enough to be ready to be adapted for each of all the other coins that are out there. If the bridge is stable maybe I will try cloning that for other coins instead of trying to clone the gateway.

-MarkM-

[jkljb]

OpenCoin's system is to award themselves 100 billion XRP, and distribute and sell 80 billion of these over time. I personally do not understand why people would object to this.

Probably because there is a missing 20 billion to account for. What can possibly be the purpose of retaining so much XRP if not to exert control?

It is definitely a SCAM.
A fool has created the coins and got 8% and a sudden just decided to sell all: http://www.coindesk.com/price-ripple-xrp-plummets-co-founde-9-billion-selloff/

I saw this in a group on Facebook:

I just know that the price of Ripple ( XPR ) , which has never been seen well by bitcoiners / altcoiners by being centralized , now took a sudden drop of almost 50 % in price .

It happened that one of the founders of Ripple Labs , Jed McCaleb , issued a statement saying it would sell its 9 billion ripples , which was his share of the cake on top of the division of 100 billion ripples ( same total DUKE ) that were distributed as follows : 80 billion passed on to users and investors and $ 20 billion for the company Ripple Labs .

McCaleb said : " We plan to start selling the rest of my XRP within two weeks Why do I have a great respect for members of the community and want to be transparent , I am announcing it publicly before starting . . "

For those who do not know , Jed McCaleb was the guy who founded and later sold Mt.Gox pro Mark Karpeles in 2011 . And if you wonder why Bitstamp sells ripples , is why McCaleb is a partner at Pantera Capital , the firm that invested heavily in Bitstamp .

PS.Sorry to resurrect the topic 

[sleepygeekygeek]

Isn't ripple an IOU.  You create these TRUST lines.  If people don't honor it then your IOU you gained is not worth much.  So I guess ripple is a shitty concept because people will always  default.  That is my view.  Have to tell you I it's too complicated for me so I never bother to figure it out. hehe