Topic: Is Ripple a Bitcoin Killer or Complementer? Founder of Mt Gox will launch Ripple (Read 34058 times)

I am going to lock this topic since I feel like my question is answered.  Most of these discussions should go in Alternative Cryptocurrencies.

It's possible, but it requires a lot of people to do a lot of things very wrong.

Unfortunately in some jurisdictions debt is a magic word, so that you always have to accept fiat instead of whatever is actually owed, or something like that?

So if you held, say five million bitcoin-IOUs, someone could, on some day when bitcoins happen to hit a dip in value on some exchange some jurisdiction uses to decide how much of their fiat bitcoins are "worth", send you fiat of that jurisdiction to cancel the five million bitcoin "debt".

Good luck buying five million bitcoins with that fiat...

-MarkM-

Yes and no.

Yes, because indeed the exchange system in Ripple is P2P, so it's very difficult for the government to stop it.

No, because Ripple is also vulnerable, at least because of its Gateways.  However, I presume if Ripple is successful, then the internal fiat currencies could be used per se and then the system would not need gateways anymore.

Just a couple of basic questions as I'm trying to understand ripple....

Would ripple help secure bitcoin because it further abstracts exchange? For instance already bitcoins are a "virtual" currency. The government can try to make bitcoins illegal. But if ripple is built on top of bitcoin all the sudden now not only is it a virtual currency being traded but it isn't even really being traded... just debts are being passed around. Is it possible that it could somehow legally protect bitcoin in the future? Just wondering.

From what I understand, such an attack would be successful only if the bots are capable of convincing other humans (or even other bots) to elect them as validators.  Humans will probably chose other humans as validators, so those bots would need to pass a Turing test.

Of course, the attack could be done only with humans but then it would require quite a lot of human work.

They could pull a long con after gaining high trust.

Just read the wiki page about Consensus.   Basically it's a system where each node trusts a particular set of validators who are believed not to collude to about the ledger.

It seems quite smart.


From what I understand, one needs to find people to trust not to be the same person or working together to screw you, though.  It should not be too difficult, I guess.

So, a bot-net can really be useful in destroying a payment system? The bots will pretend to be honest nodes for long time before they start to attack the system. Is that possible?

No, I understand what you meant, it just doesn't match what you said. Information being scarce and monopolies being scarce are not interchangeable concepts. The former is false due to the nature of information, while the latter is inevitable due to the nature of monopolies. The only "pretending" going on is the pretense that they are equivalent.

All of that is really beside the point, however, as bitcoins are not private keys, and none of the other information in the Bitcoin system is private. Even revealing all of the private keys wouldn't result in the creation of any additional bitcoins; it would just create a "gold rush" as people raced to transfer the existing bitcoins to new private keys. If bitcoins are scarce (and they clearly are), it isn't the result of any hypothetical scarcity of information.

Well, right now OpenCoin could do whatever it wants, though that would be a pretty self-destructive thing to do. Once the system is decentralized, it would be equivalent to Bitcoin people agreeing to change the block reward. Can anyone 100% guarantee it won't happen? No. Is it likely to happen? Not at all, not unless something truly awful would happen if it wasn't changed.

For example, one could imagine in the far future if XRP are so scarce that their divisibility is a problem, there could be an agreement to multiply all XRP values by 1,000 to restore divisibility. This is at least sort of creating XRP. (And one can imagine this same thing happening for Bitcoins.)

No

so IT IS possible for them to create more ripples, isn't it?

Oh, so your whole deal was just to pretend that you didn't understand what people meant when they said "information is scarce". To clarify, when everyone else says "information is scarce" they mean what you mean by "monopolies on certain kinds of information are scarce".

I made a thread to talk about and test ripple: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ripple-lets-test-it-145896

for those that didn't spot it: here you can get some XRP: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1544043

This is getting way off-topic, but to answer your question, if I did choose to give you the key, we would both have it, so the key itself isn't scarce. It can't be consumed, only replicated. There is value in having monopolies on certain kinds of information, however, and it is these monopolies which are scarce. If I agreed to tell you the private key, I would be consuming my monopoly, trading my exclusive knowledge of the key for other goods.

Scarcity is fundamentally the idea that there isn't enough of a good to go around, no matter how it's distributed, implying that some uses must be prioritized over other uses. Information benefits those who know it without being consumed in the process; there is always enough of it to go around, though it isn't always to the benefit of those who know the information to share it with others.

"All ripples were made at the network’s inception (100 billion). No more will ever be created."

The way I understand ripples (XRP) are merely used as a DDOS/Spam prevention measure. No reason to hoard unless you want to attack the ripple system at some point.

I'd like to try the beta client, have a wallet (rpH3zuMch2GrrYX724xGWwbMGwiQ5RbSAU). Can someone send me some token-amount of something? There's not much I can do now, need some contacts at least. Also: how to issue my pig-halves?

the idea of XRP as a postage stamp attached to an envelope is a great one.


whereby the XRP only holds the information about the details of other currencies being moved around and ripple gets paid by you buying a number of transactions. (stamped envelopes)

its like sending cash in the mail, you can put a bitcoin paper wallet into an envelope, a £10 note, $10 note. the XRP just ensures it travels safely around the worlds postal network (XRP blockchain).

ripple is giving away millions of free stamps so that everyone can start sending transactions to each other for free, XRP are not a currency themselves in the way that bitcoins are.

there is however an opportunity that if ripple decides to increase their 'fee' then everyone holding hoards of empty stamped envelops can sell them for a fraction of the ripple asking price, privately. where by they would make a small profit, due to the fact that they were initially given the envelopes for free.

the XRP is not a 'pre-mine' it is not a method to make ripple millionaires before they have even opened. it simply the same scenario as the postal service pre-printing stamps and giving out half its supply and holding onto the other half to cope with demand while allowing them freedom to print more at their leisure.

so those spouting out FUD please read the details of ripple, or atleast try beta testing how it works. and have some half knowledge about what ripple actually is/will be used for before shouting out bitcoin Armageddon stories.

And they are destroyed as they are spent on fees, the fees do not go to anyone such as miners etc. So the total number will go downward over time.

-MarkM-