If Ripple becomes popular, the price of XRP is fairly stable, and there's little perceived risk of a sudden change in price, people will probably use XRP as a currency. It can be held in Ripple with no counter-party risk, and under those conditions could be useful as a "bridging" currency -- because there's only one XRP, paths to and from XRP could be the best way to make a gateway's balances liquid. But those are a lot of if's. There are people who think that will never happen and people who think it's inevitable. If you think it's inevitable, then XRP is designed to be a currency. If you think it will never happen, then XRP is not designed to be a currency.
ok, that's pretty much what i thought.
i was merely looking for some acknowledgment of xrp being used as a currency from someone within the ripple inner circle.
i am certain there were MANY ideas on how fb & twitter would eventually make money (ads being the most obvious). and those were clearly CENTRALIZED networks (with a single master); ripple claims that it will not be (
and its why i have doubts that the source will be released any time soonish...)
That really doesn't make any sense. If we were going to keep it closed, we would have just said so from the beginning. We could have required people to sign a contract to get the server code and used certificates to authenticate connections. We could have saved a lot of the design hassle of eliminating the requirement that no central authorities be needed. We chose not to do this because we honestly believe that's a losing strategy. Satoshi could have done the same thing with Bitcoin and sold "mining contracts" if he wanted to. But would Bitcoin be where it is today if he had chosen that route?
In what world though, in a business that relies on people to trust that the rules won't change on the whim of a single party, would any sane person start out a new system with such a huge change in the fundamental rules on the whim of a single party?
above all, its the
soonish that bothers me the most. as a developer i truly sympathize with giving hard deadlines when you really don't have a reasonable expectation of when something will be delivered; but i
cynically translate this as, "we'll release it when a hard-fork is no longer a threat to our profits" (there is no evidence of this, just the way i feel about it)
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i'd like to just throw out a couple ideas on xrp distribution options:
social networksfacebook, google+, renren and the like would easily allow you to use some credibility scale based on friends, posts, likes, whatever (similar to how you managed the ripplegiveaway here).
android/iphone/fb appcreating a ripple game/app of sorts would allow you to leverage the social graph to spread the word very quickly (probably virally) to a very broad and diverse pool of users.
twitterusing some sort of bot to manage a
#RippleGiveaway hashtag.
though, i don't know enough about twitter to offer any details as to how to scale credibility.
obviously mitigating abuse is the priority here, but chances are nothing you do will ever satisfy everyone's definition of fair; however, these ideas would certainly offer a very broad and diverse selection pool upon which to distribute.
~49b left to gois there already a thread asking for input from the community on a fair system?
should there be?