Topic: After testing Ripple... - page 4. (Read 8658 times)

In any system, you can work out the easiest way for the system to betray its users, and then determine what resources it would take to do that and whether the payoff would be sufficient to justify the effort. A system will be safe provided it has the right margins between the cost to make the attack work, the benefit to the attacker of a successful attack, and the harm to the victims of the attack. Think about what would happen if someone who wanted to hurt Bitcoin managed to collect 51% of the mining power. With explicit trust, it's just as hard to accumulate 51%, but everyone else can just stop trusting all the entities they see cooperating in the attack, and the attacker has to start over from scratch.

So this is basically a proof-of-stake based on number of nodes and web-of-trust? i.e., all of my honest friends think this is not a double-spend, so this is not a double-spend. I seriously doubt if this could be at least as safe as proof-of-work of bitcoin. If it were, Satoshi would not have to implement proof-of-work. Obviously, an attacker could split the network (if not overwriting transactions) by controlling >51% of nodes and declaring the rest as dishonest. The only reason for abolishing mining I could think of is to allow the developers to collect transaction tax through selling Ripple Credit

How about my second point? I can illustrate by the following table:

Payment method	Anonymity	Traceable by unrelated parties
Gold, cash, pre-paid gift card	Yes	No
Credit card	No	No
Bitcoin	Yes	Yes
Ripple	No	Yes

In a creditor-debtor relationship, only the creditor could be anonymous. If the debtor is anonymous, the creditor will very likely get burnt (e.g. TorWallet). For cash and gift card, the holders are debtor so they could be anonymous. Gold and bitcoin are commodity and not debt, so they could be anonymous for anyone. On the other hand, credit card and ripple are based on credit so they could not be anonymous. (theoretically the debtor in ripple could be anonymous, but this seems not intended in the design)

Gold and cash are basically untraceable. There is transaction record for gift card and credit card but they are inaccessible to unrelated parties and are good enough for daily legal use. Bitcoin is decentralized and the record has to be traceable for everyone to prevent double-spend. This is not a major problem because bitcoin is anonymous. Ripple is the worst choice among all. Who would like to show their credit card bill to everyone, related and unrelated? Not me.

Think of a room full of people who all agree with each other. To enter the room, you must agree with them. To disagree with them, you must leave the room. They all sit in this room maintaining continuous agreement on everything. Each of them who is honest puts their first priority on enforcing the rules of the room, their second priority on maintaining agreement with everyone who is also willing to follow the rules, and their third priority on accepting legitimate transactions provided they don't violate the first two rules. The rules of the room make it infeasible to agree to a transaction once a conflicting transaction has been agreed to -- such an agreement cannot be formed and be valid according to the rules.

I don't have the details of ripple. However, based on the known info, it seems to have 2 fundamental problems:

1. double-spend. It seems ripple uses trust instead of mining to prevent double spend. Even if an IOU is issued by a trustworthy entity, people spending it may not. In contrast, in a colored-bitcoin scheme you only need to trust the IOU issuer, and the rest is protected by mining. If there is a trust-less and decentralized solution without any kind of proof-of-work or proof-or-stake, it would definitly be a bitcoin-killer (but I don't think this could happen).

2. Trust and anonymity are fundamentally incompatible concepts. Normally people won't trust an anonymous entity, especially for real money (the exceptions are anonymous services such as SilkRoad and TorWallet, which the users also demand anonymity).

-In real life banking, you won't get a credit card without showing all AML documents and proof of your salary. These sensitive personal information is kept by the bank and is (supposed) not to be disclosed.

-In bitcoin, which is decentralised, users have no choice but disclose their transactions to the world. On the other hand, mining makes bitcoin trust-less and user's identity is irrelevant. Therefore, bitcoin could be anonymous/pseudonymous.

-Ripple, however, is a decentraized web-of-trust system. This means all transactions have to be linked to entities in the real world. Who would like to let everyone know their  account balance? Even worse, imagine a transaction like this: Bob sells a HD5970 to Calvin for a sex IOU issued by Ann. Is it going to be permanently written in the blockchain and known by everyone forever?

Ripple.com will launch the first p2p Ripple implementation, but several of them has been discussed here and there's actually another design.
Ripplepay or villages.cc implement the Ripple concept on centralized servers. If you want to know the general concept, probably the old wiki is the place to go right now:

http://archive.ripple-project.org/

If you already know LETS, time banking or another form of mutual credit, this pages will be useful:

http://archive.ripple-project.org/Main/AnIntroductionForCommunityCurrencyAdvocates

If you don't know what LETS is about, well, there's plenty of material on the internet, but here's a documentary with lots of views:

http://www.themoneyfix.org/

Finally, I find this short video very instructive and profound explaining Ripple in the context of other monetary systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySzqM5dpF7s


No reason why. The unit is voluntarily chosen between borrower and lender so there's nothing stopping them from using 1970usd (adjusting for inflation), a basket of commodities ala Lietaer's Terra (even if there's no backing anywhere and the currency only exists as a unit of credit) or any other index. But there's no need to make any pegging. The host currency (XRP) is cash and it should have a floating value just like bitcoin.
If you want to issue credit denominated in XRP, that's with you and the people that accept your IOUs, but you don't need to.

I think xrp, btc, usd, eur, jpy, etc. will all be progressively replaced by more stable credit units such as the indexes proposed. Anyone can define a new index. E.C. Riegel predicted that private credit units would converge in something he called the valun, but I haven't finished any of his books yet and I can't give much detail on this. What I've read so far has greatly influenced me though.

I still remember poor David. 

I found it... Villages.cc

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/im-researching-ripple-join-villagescc-and-ill-pay-you-02-bitcoin-more-64411

I signed up and messed with it a bit, but didn't go very far.

So what's XRP? Is this thing issued by the ripple dev team and backed by ripple dev team? Is it a one-time issue or continues to be issued via the trust network?

The XRP currency as a choice on Ripple's website should be removed asap or it'll compromise the really valuable idea behind this project!

That was probably Ryan Fugger's original ripple system. The new Ripple system takes a lot from the original Ripple but also takes a lot of ideas from Bitcoin.

I think I made a Ripple account many months back and someone asked me to join their trust circle or network or something... perhaps they've added a new XRP currency to their website/system.

Or perhaps I'm recalling some other trust website IOU system... I'll have to brainstorm and search my records to see what I'm recalling....

Is it possible to download the client for testing purposes?

It seems to request a password to log in first.

I think ripple best compares to the SWIFT system except there's no central control.

In other words banks already use Ripple, but they use a chickenscratches in clay / inkblots / pencil and paper era implementation of it...

-MarkM-

Fiat currencies only exist as either physical currency or IOUs (arguably, with exceptions such as MintChip). When someone says "I have $1,000", they mean either that they have dollar bills totaling $1,000 or, more likely in the modern world, that a bank owes them $1,000. If I pay you $100 without delivering physical dollar bills to you (whether by check, PayPal, wire transfer, Western Union, or Ripple), what I've actually done is switched from someone owing me $100 to someone owing you $100 (someone you have specifically chosen to use for this purpose). Modern electronic finance systems handle fiat currencies as IOUs. We don't have to think of them this way because it's behind the scenes.

It's as if we explained paying $100 for something with PayPal this way: You give your credit card issuer a $100 IOU, promising to pay them back later (outside the PayPal system). They then give a $100 IOU to PayPal. PayPal then gives a $100 IOU to the seller. The seller gives this IOU to their bank and now their bank owes them $100. They can withdraw this money from their bank by showing up at a branch (again, outside the PayPal system). So you can think of PayPal working by moving IOUs around. You don't have to think of it this way, but it's sometimes helpful. The net result is that the buyer owes his credit card issuer $100, the seller's bank owes them $100, and the seller considers the buyer to have paid them $100.

Ripple got its name because of the way these IOUs "ripple" through the system.

Ahh fresh hypocrisy.  That smell!
Just waiting to watch somebody shooting oneself in the foot.

It's a payment system like paypal that supports any money anyone would want to accept through it but it's open source, more decentralized and essentially free.

So is ripple a competitor or friend to bitcoin? Still having trouble getting my head around it.

Ripple touts itself as...

"truly open" -- "no one owns the ripple network"

Yet, here is the literal view of the ripple network:

https://ripple.com/examples/graph.html

Notice it is denominated in XRP.... now notice the guy that has "total coins" of over 17 billion!

rJYMACXJd1eejwzZA53VncYmiK2kZSBxyD

I strongly challenge their characterization of the term ownership.

I honestly have no idea.  I've only watched the videos and tested the website.  I have to say I was fascinated by the trust concept (and still am), but the whole 100 Billion XPR thing is a real turn off.