So there's
Nxt, MasterCoin, BitShares (or is it ProtoShares?), eMunie, Open Transactions, all of which are supposedly going to be launched/released soon (any others?). It is very easy to market vaporware - just claim that your product has feature X, and it does. Since its just vaporware it can have all the best features before it even exists.
Ripple, on the other hand, actually exists and already has one major gateway (kraken next in line) and two chinese gateways (with rising CNY capitalization btw, up from 250k CNY in october to 539k CNY on Nov 12th to 787k CNY today).
The competition hasn't even left the starting line.
If you think of Open-Transactions as a competitor to Ripple, then you are misinformed. That's like calling openssl a competitor to Excel.
Also, OT has been publicly available for a long time:
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-TransactionsOkay then, I should have said Invictus Innovations, Monetas, and Ripple Labs.
I know OT has been available, and you're right that its not a fair comparison to Ripple. Because OT is an API around Chaumian cash/Lucre coins. The p2p exchange is a "feature" which exists only on the roadmap, and in various proposals for a "holy grail" bitmessage-based exchange and multi-sig voting pools.
Then there's Ripple, which already has a distributed ledger and is constantly matching bid/ask offers every few seconds. Pretty good volume today, users were trading $1k chunks of bitstamp USD for XRP. And deposits at the chinese gateways broke the CNY 1,000,000 mark.
Let me ask you, why should anyone use Bitcoin, when they can just use Paypal?
-- Paypal is in many countries.
-- Paypal has a worldwide ledger tracking everyone's account balance.
-- Paypal allows you to convert into other currencies.
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/sell/mc/mc_convert-outside-- Paypal allows you to receive money in many different currencies.
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/sell/mc/mc_receive-outside-- Paypal processes over $315 million in payments every day. (Pretty good volume.)
-- Users often trade $1K chunks of USD for Paypal USD.
-- Paypal is in China.
https://cms.paypal.com/c2/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_c2/CNPayPalComparison&locale.x=zh_XC---------------------------------------------------------------
What you do not understand is that Open-Transactions is a software library, like OpenSSL.
Calling OT a competitor to Ripple is like calling OpenSSL a competitor to Ripple.
We are talking about a
software library... libraries are used by many different entities, for many different purposes.
Libraries are not in competition with any companies.
Companies are not in competition with any libraries.
Libraries are used to build things.
---------------------------------------------------------------
It is not my intention to sit here talking about Ripple, nor to badmouth them in any way. They are adding value to the digital finance space.
In fact I like the Ripple guys, and I love Fugger's concept.
I like it so much, that I wrote extensively about it in early 2012, in this document I shared with them back then:
http://ft.vm.to/files/FT-thoughts.pdfI hope they succeed! The same goes for Invictus Innovations, colored coins, Mastercoin, and a million other ventures. My goal here is to spread concepts and code, and to promote all entities who innovate in the digital finance space. May they succeed.
I do not have a poverty mentality, but an abundance mentality. I do not have an either/or mentality, but an integration mentality.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Open-Transactions is a fundamentally different thing.
-- If you have an "account balance" in OT, it is impossible for anyone except the user himself to change that balance. Is Ripple competing with OT on that concept?
-- If you have a balance on any OT server, the server will never need to send/receive any bank wires in any currency, nor maintain any bank accounts. Is Ripple competing with OT on that concept?
-- In Ripple, you trust your gateway to store any dollar reserves. But in OT, your client would access many servers, yet none of them store any reserves at all.
-- If you want to build software enabling various financial instruments (cheques, cash, dividends, stocks, basket currencies, smart contracts, recurring payments) then you could use OT to build it. For example, for making printed vouchers, or parking garage tickets, then you could use OT to build it. You could use OT for escrow with arbitration. You could send an OT payment to someone who has never installed OT. Is Ripple competing with OT on those concepts?
-- Ripple has a distributed order book. But in OT, the "order book" exists on the client-side. It's the
client in OT that combines various order sources into a single book. OT is client-centric.
-- In Ripple, the ledger chain stores all transactions. But OT processes transactions
without storing any history.
-- You are correct that OT also does Chaumian blinding, but to characterize it as a "blinding API" would be woefully inadequate.
===>
These are not value-judgments. I am simply pointing out that you are comparing Apples and Oranges. Ripple is cool stuff, but it is not an alternative to OT. It has different goals, a different design philosophy, different functionality, and different uses based on different solutions. These things are not "either/or."
===> BTW, you seem to believe the "holy grail" is vaporware. But if you check the bounty thread, you can see fast progress is being made. Expect to see more updates in the coming days and weeks.
