Which exchanger will be the next big gateway?
- BTC-e
- mcxNOW
- Mtgox ...
None because they know it's a bad idea to support Ripple.
Myth: Ripple is decentralized, or open sourcing Ripple will make it decentralizedRipple was designed around centralization. The network consensus is built upon trust because
they're Ripple Labs and they said so, instead of trust because of proof of work or expense of computational power like Bitcoin. The currency is built upon
because gateways said so, instead of cryptographic proof or the decentralized mining process. Don't forget all XRPs (Ripples) were premined - all 100 billion of them. Ripple calculates their market capitalization with all 100 billion XRPs, despite the fact that the vast majority are not in circulation.
How would you kill a decentralized internet currency? By making a centralized one, complete with infinite money printing via gateways, where you don't have control of your money (gateways can arbitrarily levy fees on your transfers of IOUs) and
much much more.Before you buy into the 'promises' of Ripple,
learn about what Ripple actually is. It's distributed, like having load balancers. It's not decentralized by any stretch of the word, and open sourcing code that forces centralization does not mean anything.
Yeah, the main problem I see with Ripple is that it's probably a lot more centralized than it appears, even ignoring the issues with XRP distribution and source availability.
AFAICT, Ripple requires that your UNL:
- Contain entities that won't cooperate to defraud you.
- Contain entities that themselves have good UNLs, and the entities in their UNLs must have good UNLs, etc.
- Form a "good network". A UNL containing just your friends wouldn't form a good network because you wouldn't be linked well-enough to the rest of Ripple. Your section of the network might get into a situation where its idea of history will never converge with the rest of the network's idea of history.
As a result, I believe that Ripple can really only be used reliably and securely if everyone has pretty much the same UNL. It's probably OK to remove or add a handful of nodes to your UNL, but at least a big portion of it probably needs to remain the same between users. So this ends up being a distributed system, but not a decentralized one. Whoever decides who's on the canonical UNL has a lot of power over the network. Also, people generally can't be "full nodes" in Ripple and participate in the consensus process because full nodes need to be online all the time and in someone's UNL.
Despite this, I wouldn't be surprised to see Ripple grow over the next few years. A lot of people think that it's decentralized and safe, and if they use the default centralized Ripple configuration it probably will be safe and stable in the short-term, and it'll be a lot cheaper to transact using Ripple than with Bitcoin. But it won't actually be as decentralized or as robust as Bitcoin, and legal issues may bring the whole thing down eventually.
