RIPPLE Vs. NXT (continued)Ok, to continue an important conversation I think, I've chewed on Jame's response a little and now would like to posit a polite reply:
Sorry for the giant quote wall but I think the context is needed for continuity.
I'm glad to hear you have some experience with Ripple. I've been more and more thinking that NXT is shaping up to be nothing more than a Ripple copy-cat and one that is not as good at that and I'd love to hear why you think this is not so.
Ripple already is way faster, Has Decentralized Exchange w/ cross currency trading (Can buy NXT from Peercover with Bitstamp BTC or even Bitstamp USD), the XRP fees for trading are infinitesimal and only for spam protection. You can covert USD to XRP directly via SnapSwap (albeit w/ too high fees). You can even "mine"/acquire them with a far greater return through the BOINC WCG, which is a very noble cause.
NXT is slower, all the assets can only be purchased in NXT, there are NXT fees for doing anything, there is a NXT fee for PLACING a buy or sell order (which no other exchange does) , no one knows if enough people will run nodes, and it's been sounding like the system may end up needing centralized high performing servers to be able to boost the transaction speed to anywhere near what Ripple already has.
I'm really interested in hearing your thoughts on why you think NXT is better than Riipple and why the liquidity will be better or the spreads closer, why more companies and assets will be attracted to it, why REAL businesses and banks will buy into it & why it will be any more successful.
Ripple community is a small circle of about a dozen guys who are mostly composed of naysayers who dont do much other than rip other people's ideas to shreds. A few fanboys, but at any given point in time only a few people are even on the forum. I defected over to NXT when I was reprimanded for trying to get a NXT market jump started over new years holidays. It seems the ripple forum is moderated by people who view anything close to ripple as a threat that needs to be squelched. NXT certainly fit the bill.
I don't get that impression at all. Are you talking about the forum that you get to from ripple.com? There are other forums as well such as xrptalk and openxrp and I've found people to be pretty enthusiastic about ripple. The company seems to be professionally and transparently run by actual people with actual surnames instead of just usernames. They even get their fair share of the Libertarian crowd especially at OpenXRP. It's hard for me to know if you were actually "run out of town" over there as you say. You do seem to take constructive criticism too much to heart at times here to be honest. Don't get me wrong. I think it's because you're passionate and work hard and care and don't want to waste time on something the community rejects. it's part of your talent but makes me wonder if perhaps what happened at Ripple is being overstated a bit. I've seen no evidence of that kind of behavior but then again I'm not like totally immersed in that world.
As to any criticism being based on your trying to get a NXT market going there, you can currently purchase NXT in Ripple via peercover gateway, so they don't seem to be censoring NXT or any other currency as you say. The liquidity and spreads are not the worst things in the world. I bought 200 NXT in Ripple. Now I WILL say that Peercover has a shitty ass website that I haven't been able to get to sync up to my Ripple wallet, so for now my NXT is stuck inside Ripple.
From a trader's perspective, USD != USD due to no cross redemption agreements between the various USD gateways. This leads to situations where you can pay a 50% premium to purchase BTC. Especially due to the large spreads going from anything to XRP and from XRP to anything else. There are basically 5 "active" markets in ripple BTC/XRP, USD/XRP (2) and CNY/XRP (2) The total trading volume in all five is less than NXT volumes are now and this is when NXT is "sleeping"
I'll give you that their system is still in it's infancy stage but it's still light years ahead of where NXT is. You can convert any currency on the fly to any other currency including BTC. It's pretty amazing and imagine after it evolves even more in a few years. XRP price has actually been pretty stable over a long period of time. It went up to about $0.02 earlier this year and went back to .015 or so most recently. It's been in that general range for quite some time. I don't think it's altogether much more volatile than a lot of real currencies.
I've never paid a 50% premium to purchase BTC (admittedly I don't purchase a lot of BTC that way, preferring coinbase) I've found that the with several gateways you can "shop around" via one interface and find the best deals. You can even arbitrage there almost easier than anywhere else.
Oh, the giant elephant. 48 billion more XRP to be "distributed", which at any moment can disrupt the entire XRP ecosystem. Already, Jed McLeb donated many millions of XRP, which immediately diluted all XRP holdings. Basically any XRP based business that was holding XRP inventory lost 10% of value before they could do anything about it. Not that you can do much about it due to such low volumes in the market. Currently the bitcoin bridge is not working and hasnt been for 2 weeks. An inconvenience if you have a bitstamp acct, if not your XRPs and BTC inside ripple are trapped with no way out.
So out of 100 billion total OVER HALF have already been distributed and that's a bad thing? They also have a way to get them for free through many giveaways and the ability to lease your CPU to the World Community Grid for Scientific Research. That is pretty cool.
The only way to get any amount of NXT is to purchase it. Have half of all NXT been distributed as equally as XRP has? How is NXT's situation any better with the giant whales standing over us, completely capable of affecting the market on a whim. EMule may be full of shit but what he claims to be does actually exist.
I hadn't heard about the Bitcoin bridge being down. Like I said I don't use it for BTCX that much, but I would imagine that will be fixed.
XRP is not trapped with no way out in any event because Snap Swap has bank account transfer back and forth from USD to XRP.
ripple has an AE like mechanism, but takes the position that they wont have anything to do with what happens. It is buyer beware. Also no restrictions on who can issue any specific IOU (ripple asset). Some scamster can (and has) issued "gold backed" IOU except the gold was not really accounted for and at best was something like one third backed. Another guy issued an asset that was backed fully by BTC (or so he said), but it started out at a price of 1.05 BTC. he said he would have an automatic bot that gradually raised the ASK price to 2 BTC, and because of this it was a good investment. sockpuppet show ensued.
I don't see anything wrong with "buyer beware" and I don't think NXT will be any different. I see almost no difference in what a NXT asset is and what a Ripple IOU is. Seem to be the same things going by different names.
I assume you're referring to Nofiatcoin/XNF regarding the IOU backed by gold, which for the record it's still actively trading and gets activity. I've seen no evidence that it's a 'scam" as you claim. I do find the idea that i can actually trade my XNF for real gold a little specious but I'm actually just too lazy to research it that far. I have played around with it though, mainly as a means to increase my XRP stockpile.
He doesn't get reprimanded for that, but I do for trying to create a NXT market in ripple that had potential to get good volumes.
Whoever the person who ripped people off using Ripple by making a BTC backed IOU/Asset was I find it hard to believe no one reprimanded him. I also think saying you've been reprimanded here is an overstatement. You've had criticism directed at your project. This is something personal between you and the community and stake-holders. I've got my own concerns, which have voiced by others here about nodecoins as is everyones right to do. This kind of stuff
needs to be debated as hurtful and frustrating as it might be sometimes for someone putting in a lot of brainpower. It kinda takes a thick skin to thrive as a developer in this space. I can see it leading to a lot of heartache and burnout if you're not careful. I don't want to say "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen", maybe just consider opening a window or running a fan.
Ripple is slow to react. Everything has to go through proper channels, corporate management, PR and legal review, etc. In the time ripple decides to do one thing, NXT can (and has) done dozens of things.
People are free to build infrastructure and business around RIPPLE and they are doing so quite a bit. There' dividend rippler, justcoin.com, bitstamp, peercover, ripple singapore, ripple Isreal, snap Swap, and I'm sure others. I'd like to see more 'real" businesses attached to it like a Bank or Credit Union, etc. but it's still way ahead of where NXT is on these fronts. They are proving the concept and now have to get to the next level.
Will they? Who knows. But NXT has a lot of catching up to do. Making sure things are legal and reviewed is pretty important too. As you can see every action has several implications and potential consequences. Maybe there are some advantages to board meetings, peer review over mega threads. I'd LOVE to see social media and "decentralized development" prove it can do something better than big business can but Ripples way is tried and true. NXT's way is a giant experiment.
NXT has a community that can protect its users from harm. NXT community has already tracked down crooks, got them to cough up ill gotten gains and made returns to victims. We have made continual improvements as fast as we can to protect users from newbie errors and I imagine we will continue to do so until we get it 100% foolproof.
I think you are putting too much stock in the "community" here. Communities come and go. It's the foundation that needs to be strong.
Ripple is not really extensible. After they get all the bugs out,they will have a nice cross currency payment system that is totally transparent to all govt authorities. This is a concern as USA is in the process of implementing regulations that will force people to somehow prove the provenance of all their crypto. If they cant prove where it came from, it will be deemed to be illegal and probably confiscated. Even if they dont confiscate your ripple holdings, they will be able to identify by name, address and social security number each and every account and be able to backtrace all transactions. The trend is to assume people are guilty until proven innocent. Not exactly the home of freedom and individual rights the american PR machine leads the world to believe.
Is there anyway to add anonymity to ripple? There might be technically, but it is sure to be killed by the powers that be. Ripple has its place. It will be a perfect fiat gateway for all of crypto. Somebody has to fill that role and ripple does nicely at that.
I disagree about Ripple not providing anonymity. I gave no information about myself to get a Ripple Wallet. No email address. Nothing. The ways I can be tracked are a the places you can track the users of any currency, the end points where you convert to Fiat. That is possible with Bitcoin and even NXT. I bought BTC off Coinbase (who knows a lot about me because that's the law), which I then sent it to an exchangeto purchased NXT and sent that to my wallet which is trackable by IP address. If someone wanted to figure out who I was by by crypto trail they could do it. Without mixing (which is very likely to be made illegal to do in the future in my view) anyone is trackable though crypto by authorized authorities using forensics, probably moreso than with cash.
Ripple, Bitcoin and any crypto already provides way more privacy than credit cards. As long as I'm not EASILY tracked by any Joe or Jane Schmo I am pretty cool with it and so are most people. Even cash is very very difficult to move around in large quantities. If you think governments will just let people move large amounts of crypto around completely anonymously you have another thing coming.
The liquidity here will be better because that is one of the things I have set out to do. non-profit automated multisig gateways will allow this to be possible. It will charge enough fees to pay for its expenses and it wont be a monopoly, but it will be there for NXT community to be able to trade with low spreads. Where there are low spreads, there will be liquidity.
The multisig thing intrigues me. I admittedly don't know a lot about it but hope it's as good as it sounds. Does this mean we'll have peer to peer trustless trading? if so that could be a game changer.
Ripple community did not want to listen to me and took measures to squelch me. At least here, we might disagree and tempers might flare, but at the end of the day there are many people who actively support what I am trying to do, both in public and in private, with encouragement and actual money. NXT community has its share of people who would fit right in with the ripple crowd, but there are a large number of people who are here not just to make a quick fortune, but really want to help change the world for the better.
Again, this is something personal between you and other people. I can't speak to the veracity of what amounts to personal squabbles on the internet.
For those of you who have not noticed, the war on bitcoin is escalating and with actual cash on its way to becoming less and less accepted, we MUST create anonymous crypto or there wont be any financial privacy left in the world anymore. NXT can achieve this, ripple cant.
I disagree. I think the jury is still way out. Ripple is already a viable and very easy to use product that is sort of flying under the radar.
If businesses find out how much easier it would be to accept XRP at point of sale and on the internet they'd be flocking to it. All you have to do is sign up for a Wallet, seed it with 20 XRP and put us a sign that says "WE ACCEPT RIPPLE/XRP". The weak point is immediate FIAT exchange which BTC has with bitstamp, coinbase. If Ripple partnered with a good gateway I think BTC wouldalready be having a run for it's money in the remittance and internet purchasing space.
In summary, anything ripple can do NXT can do it better. This would be the reason why businesses are better off building on top of NXT instead of on top of ripple. If we all just focused on helping businesses quickly get up to speed using NXT, it will be no contest at all. We need to think like we are an ethernet cable. We want packets going back and forth. The more activity, the better. At some point one of the NXT businesses will crack the joe-sixpack market (or teenage girl market) and go mainstream with their service. Most people wont know or care it is built on NXT, but 1% will probably find out. If it is a 10 million person market, 1% will add 100,000 active NXT users.
James
I am rooting for NXT I really am, but since I got into it I've been disappointed to see that a lot of the
claims that got me interested in it turned out to be a little over-hyped, such as Transparent Forging and 1000/TPS transactions all using a few NXT and a rasberry PI. That's how it's being sold to newcomers. It's not until you look closer that you see what's actually happening is that those advertised features may well not be possible, Elvis has left the Building with tonto fast on his heels (over to the EMunie Project perhaps, who knows?) and the emphasis is actually much stronger on the Asset Exchange than it is on NXT as a 2nd generation currency that can rival Bitcoin.
I wish your arguments could have convinced me but sadly I'm still of the opinion that Ripple and NXT are very similar and while I'd prefer NXT to come out on top I've got to say i consider Ripple a serious threat. Not to mention Emunie, Etherium & Mastercoin, (not too worried about counterparty, it's command line at this point)
I noticed that C-F-B has been watching EMunie, even commenting on their forum now and again.
