Topic: How the Ripple payment network and XRP are different from Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 11083 times)

I wish more people had exposure to this lower level discussion of the Ripple network and consensus:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867324

At the exchange level, what Ripple can accomplish is amazing. I hope to see it, or at least the ideas behind it, gain traction.

If you trade alts on an exchange---you are already using IOUs. A lot of people do not realize this. You are embracing a closed centralized IOU system. Decentralization is sacrificed. Anyone who has found themselves unable to withdraw understands exactly why this is a problem that must be solved. Ripple opens the closed IOU networks---and empowers both investors and daily users in turn.

Payments massively benefit from Ripple, with users being able to pay for goods using any currency. Individual vendor support for the currencies you hold becomes a thing of the past. USD support can mean Bitcoin support---or LTC, QRK, WDC, XPM, PPC or even DOGE. If currencies were languages, Ripple becomes a real time universal translator as the network grows.

XRP being superior to Bitcoin is a dead argument; the same goes for the opposite perspective. Ripple---as a network and currency (XRP)---solves different problems of centralization than Bitcoin and most other alts. Each offers its own unique value. They are complementary systems. Winner-takes-all is the wrong mentality. Each has its own future.

This is the kind of passionate speech that keeps humanity blind.
"How closed and centralised" without pointing how is no argument here.
Ripple is a distributed network where ledger validators majority are servers controled by Ripple Labs, just because there are no validators enough to balance the equation. When Satosh started to mine BTC how many validators were operating? How much of the hashing power was concentrated? Who is Satoshi? Do he run a mining pool? He owns at least 10% of all BTC. Ripple Labs will lose the network's control when new free validators begin to vote for other validators, its a matter of time. Otherwise, the protocol would fail and so would their company as well. So, harming network's diversity would harm Ripple Labs fatally.

Ripplescam is a biased grey propaganda, the data is not up to date.

That is TradeFortress's anti-Ripple propaganda site. It's about as trustworthy as anything else he has ever said.

All about it was already said here:
http://ripplescam.org/

Ripple will fall when real crisis will start or even faster when people get to know what it really is. 
Because of mainstream/banksters help handicap this scamcoin got high valuation but people have no knowledge about how this system work, how closed and centralised it is and how easily can be controlled by government and how fast can bring losses for users while original owners have majority owneship being risk-free at least temporarily.

Bitcoin has ripple-headache right now what is a real massive attack on all freedom, humanitarian ideas and principles standing behind it. But soon ripple will have similar headache because of what it is and true bitcoin alternatives which are coming. Scam stays scam in the end and people start to open eyes.

I don't think that is likely, as XRP is the only currency in the Ripple system that has no counterparty risk. This makes it ideal as a bridge currency. Any time anyone does transparent currency conversion inside Ripple, perhaps to buy or sell cryptocurrency against fiat, perhaps to make foreign fiat payments, they will most likely be using XRP in the background. That should create enormous demand for XRP in case Ripple gets used widely. And widespread use of Ripple for fiat payments is not dependent on the value of XRP. I think it is one of several master strokes in the Ripple design.

I don't think there's anything to outweigh there. People trying to make a buck is good old fashioned capitalism at work. They've created something valuable and deserve a shot at making money from it. I think the real question is whether it is is anyone else's interest to start using Ripple instead of forking it and starting with a new genesis ledger based on the Bitcoin UTXO set at some fixed point in time, modifying the code to allow some sort of proof-of-burn transition from Bitcoin, or implementing something similar on top of Bitcoin.

The numeric value, but not the purchasing power.

Everyone knows that the Fed could mint a quintillion dollars tomorrow if it wanted to, yet the USD roughly maintains its value.

As a corporation, we are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. With our current business model, that means acting to increase the value and liquidity of XRP. We believe this will happen if the Ripple network is widely adopted as a payment system. We are pursuing multiple avenues at once. One would expect increased demand to increase price.

I think it is mostly just a very clever experiment in social engineering - they stated that XRP are "postage stamps" yet people are now buying them for large amounts of BTC and when they finally open source and show they are "postage stamps" after all they will have made millions in selling them plus not being able to be shown as liars.

Although I can't respect it I can certainly take my hat off to the cleverness of it.

How about merely reducing volatility?


But you do intend XRP to become a real currency, not just some sort of stamp, don't you?

Hush down...  

"XRPs are just like stamps and they are only used to pay for transactions."

If some company can think it can monetize it - let it be... But they can fail, there can be other companies who would like to do it for free or smaller amounts of money...

+ don't forget - original ripple idea did not have any XRPs at all

PS. XRP will gain value by being reserve currency until enough people will say "we need alt-Ripple with cheap XRPs"

I think that the speculation in XRP might actually be the biggest *problem* for Ripple.

Right now the Open Coiners can "sell" their self-printed currency for 1 BTC per 10K (and they have billions of them).

Once Ripple actually is *working* then IF the XRP are used as what we were all told their purpose is (i.e. postage stamps) then they will be worth very little (i.e. expect a *huge crash*).

This will hurt many of the speculators (who for sure have been rather silly to gamble on it) but I wonder if the backlash will actually *kill* the project (i.e. is this gamble going to actually pay off?).

I think we've been pretty clear that we are not making any promises to manage XRP as a currency with any particular target value. The XRP that OpenCoin holds will be given away as OpenCoin thinks is appropriate to drive adoption or sold as OpenCoin thinks is appropriate for its financial needs and interests. We absolutely make no promises or representations about the value of XRP to the world in general.

But everybody knows how much XRP is hanging over the market.


That will not be possible once the source is released and the system becomes truly distributed as opposed to merely potentially distributed.

In this case creating a market expectation that XRP would be managed to retain a certain value then dumping them on the market would be seen as predatory. In the context of free banking it corresponds to the deliberate debasement of the bank's currency, or the issue of redeemable notes that it lacks the capacity to redeem.

Ripple supports Litecoin as it supports any currency. Gateways can issue and redeem Litecoin balances (Dividend Rippler and The Rock Trading already do this) and exchanges work between Litecoin and any other currency. Payments can be made with Litecoin balances or in amounts denominated in Litecoins.

As for what I think about Litecoin, I think it has two tiny advantages over Bitcoin (less time to first confirmation and higher possible transaction volume) and numerous significant disadvantages over Bitcoin (much less secure mining, much lower confirmation value, low chance for significant adoption). So I think its only chance is as an inferior alternative to Bitcoin, possibly valuable in case Bitcoin fails somehow. For example, during the Bitcoin blockchain split, Litecoins were still usable.

What do you think about Litecoin? Will Ripple support Litecoin at some point?

Can you clarify what you mean by "predatory behavior", perhaps with an example or two?

Until Ripple open sources it