Topic: Ripple: A Distributed Exchange for Bitcoin - page 4. (Read 66657 times)

As far as I understand Ripple (I do not understand Ripple very good) this is exactly what will happen - the concept of debt can pull down whole parts of the network.

The very big advantage of Bitcoin is its simplicity - not debt (at least not as part of Bitcoin) and every payment is irreversible.

If you've ever loaned a person money, you've engaged in peer-to-peer trust.

You should have considered a variety of factors: That they may get hit by a bus and be unable to pay you. That they in engage in risky behavior such as sky diving. That they gamble a lot. That they may have expensive health problems. That they may have a family emergency. That they have no financial sense. That they are too trusting. That they will make good on their obligations even, if other's default on them.

And, whether you will be forced to default on your obligations, if they default.

As such, everyone in the chain is a circuit breaker. Every person loaning money expects the lendee to pay them back regardless of circumstance. In particular, that they will be able to cover their debts, even if people default on them.

The solution is simple: don't loan money.

Ripple Labs does not encourage peer-to-peer loans. The gateway model is far preferable to peer-to-peer loans.

Sensing that this may be at least mildly overblown. Can someone who knows a lot about Ripple explain this scenario, with anecdotes?

No it is not. There are some big differences between Bitcoin and Ripple:
 - Bitcoin does not support the concept of debt (think about it - it is a crucial point)
 - Ripple depends on peer-to-peer trust. If one participant goes mad he will pull down other ones
 - who controls the money supply in Ripple I think this is up to the inbound fiat currencies - nobody wants that

Just to have a distributed ledger on credit and debit like Ripple is not enough ...

It is close competition between Bitcoin and Ripple.
I don't think any other alt-coins come  any closer to these two.
I like LTC because of it keeps ASICs away from mining.

I am holding 3 BTC, 40K XRP and 2 Testnet LTCs.
and, I am just watching the game.

what part is even vaguely controversial? ?

Zero people on my ignorelist since 2011.

The highly distilled idiocy that is often displayed here is astonishing. In all the years of fiery discussion on nasaspaceflight.com I've only ever put a single person on ignore. In the couple of weeks I've been here I've amassed over 200.

I addressed those in the other thread where you posted them: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2399066

I wish I had seen this before I took your other post seriously.

what are you basing these statements on?

It will have value if anyone ever wants/needs to make transactions on the vanilla ripple network.  The forked xrp could be valuable, too...just like litecoin has a value.  Since xrp is meant to have minimal value anyway this is not a huge deal either way, except possibly to opencoin shareholders.

LOL.  This might work on the clueless kids logged onto this forum, but it's not working on me.

Is a pseudo-transaction request the only way to upgrade the protocol? Can a super-majority of validators upgrade the protocol to create more XRP?

His money would have been better invested shooting craps.

Are you trolling?

Repeating what I said (both XRP and BTC can be inflated, BTC risks loosing their miners, Opencoin risks loosing their customer base, both risk loosing trust which is the only thing that keeps both currencies afloat) and re-formatting it in bold doesn't change much.

I'll just ignore the ad-hominem attacks, also if you feel that my posts are stupid or that I lie about working for Opencoin (hm, actually I could contact them if people already think I do work for them...?) you're free to press that ignore button to the left of this post, kthxbye.

Back on topic:
I wonder why there are still so few highly trusted entities for cryptocurrency IOUs in Ripple, the ones I know of are:
TradeFortress(lol!)
Bitstamp
WeExchange (who think of removing Ripple functionality for some time/indefinitely until the server runs more stable)
DividendRippler

That's more or less all I know of, which is a little bit little so to say...
Where are actually the issues besides being trusted by the community when setting up a cryptocoin IOU gateway? Do you absolutely need a server? Is it too hard to code a client for this?

Cryptocurrencies should actually be one of the easiest things to get into Ripple, as there are probably also fewer regulations around them. Why are there so few gateways then? (yes, I know that there will be a handful of "hero members" who will now post again that's clear "because it is a scam"... if you think that there are other reasons besides that, please post them too)

Seriously ? I always thought they pay you for writing these stupid posts.


OMG.
Who cares what you believe ?

The FACT (not belief) is that they can(being centrally controlled & closed source) ISSUE AS MANY XRPs as they want AT ANY TIME they want.


Correct - you are seriously working for the scammy opencoin bastards.

On Ripple itself, it is after all an IOU exchange/market place.

on what exchange?

I'm not aware of any kind of transaction in Ripple (probably JoelKatz can shed more light on this) that would even allow issuing more XRP out of the blue.
Anyways, we're quite a bit offtopic here, if you want to continue to argue that XRP are worthless (or worth less...), please open another thread for discussing this.

What I find interesting is that even though Opencoin just started their giveaway of 1000 XRP to their mailing list, the price compared to BTC actually rose, so more and more people are selling BTC for XRP, not the other way round! I would have suspected that lots of Bitcoiners/latecomers for the forum giveaway would just cash out their 1k XRP and be smug about the "free 10-15 Bitcents"...

Either they don't even want that free money (or it is "too much hassle"?) or TradeFortress and co should have better invested their ad money in a usable OpenTransaction client bounty.

Hate this ping pong kind of discussion but, Yes it is a proof of work.
It is irrelevant if you get them from the person that mined it or not. It had to be mined, there is mathematically no other possible way to create it (unlike ripple)

Once again, that is irrelevant. When BTC was easy to mine it was naturally not as valuable as it is today. Your coins were either mined at a high dificulty, or during the early days, when investing in mining had much higher risk than now. I'm not sure what is that you're trying to prove with that observation.

Yeah, I will put a bet on something which outcome will take years. Anyway, what are you trying to prove? At the most you prove that you like betting. Suggesting a bet doesn't put you on the right, quite the opposite.

This is just plain false.
If you change the BTC protocol to mint more coins, you need to convince 50%+ to accept your blockchain fork and not some other.
You are basically saying that I cannot be sure that bitcoin network won't be disrupted. Sure, that's true. But to ripple all it takes is opencoin's CEO having a bad day. It's not 'just as'.

That is exactly my point.
Community consensus is much more secure than the mood of opencoins CEO.

If I have a blockchain and a bitcoin implementation on my computer, I can instruct my computer to effectively verify that the coins I own were issued to somebody that has contributed to the network with an amount of work likely proportional to that amount of coins.
By using the ripple client I can only verify that the XRP was issued by opencoin. Considering they did it with nearly zero effort I am pretty much verifying that bananas.

A BTC is not a proof of work, you can obtain them without having done any mining.
Also they are fungible, meaning that you can spend a BTC that was created when difficulty was still 1 the same as a recent one with difficulty far OVER 9000.

As I already said: I don't believe Opencoin (with whom I'm not affiliated in any way) will issue any more XRP, you're free to suggest a formal bet (in BTC with escrow and whatnot) on that to me.

Your client most likely also doesn't trace back to the coinbase transaction (except if you are using colored coins).
Anyways, as I "don't answer your questions" let me have a last try:

I'm serious.

You cannot be sure, jsut as you cannot be sure that there will be 21 million Bitcoins ever. There is no inherent limit in the underlying mathematics, so any limit (100 billion XRP, 21 million BTC) is an arbitrary choice that is done by a community in the case of Bitcoin and a company in the case of XRP. In both cases it is against their expressed intent to issue more currency than initially planned. Both currencies are not backed by anything really but their utility as money and the trust of their respective community. Just as the Bitcoin community would probably react negatively or even hostile towards anyone changing the maximum amount of Bitcoins, a similar loss in trust would be the case with Opencoin + XRP inflation.

As I said, you cannot be sure with any cryptocurrency that rules won't change BUT it is in the best interest of the ones running that currency to make sure to deliver on their promises as they are mainly backed by trust and utility, not gold or a country.

Proof of Work is not magically limiting your Bitcoins to 21 millions, there are PoW coins out there with different/no limits and some with all/lots of coins mined in the genesis block.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "verifying", I assumed that you mean "check, if that transaction I received actually is valid, has been finalized in the global ledger and I can spend the money I received". My answer has been "it works just like BTC" which was not enough for you.

You verify the transactions in the blocks aka. ledger since genesis, just like in Bitcoin.
After your transaction is in there, you can spend the money with your private key. It does not matter when it has been created, just like in Bitcoin, as long as the transaction used to send it to you was valid, the XRP/BTC are valid too.

how can BTC have any value if it's possible for anyone to run their own Bitcoin network ie. the software is open source?