Topic: Ripple competition - page 8. (Read 20549 times)

The main difference is that people who have trusted different exchanges can still make payments to each other.

A secondary difference is that the exchanges can't as easily target a single customer. If an exchange decides it won't let you specifically withdraw for some reason, you are pretty much stuck. If a Ripple gateway does the same thing, you can just trade your assets at that exchange for assets issued by a gateway that will let you withdraw. You can move funds into or out of a gateway without needing that gateway to perform each operation or subjecting it to arbitrary and unpredictable rules.

If you hold Bitstamp assets on Ripple and decide that for some reason you don't want to hold them anymore, you can sell them for XRP immediately without having to ask Bitstamp to perform the transfer.

I do not think Ripple is a Ponzi scheme. People who don't understand say the same thing about bitcoin. In fact if one more person calls Bitcoin a ponzi scheme I think I might smash their face in with the dictionary so they can review the definition of ponzi scheme via the imprint on their face... but anywaaayyyy - I am not be a big ripple fan (I should say XRP fan) but I don't see it as competition for bitcoin. I see more of a compliment to bitcoin, another ally in the war against (traditional) banks and needless merchant fees. Some interesting payment systems would theoretically be designed on top of ripple, which would operate much more efficiently than what we have now, especially internationally. Paying $40 for a wire transfer needs to be a thing of the past. Now.

I can transfer a whole god damn 1080p movie (20,000,000 kb) to someone on the other side of the globe in no time for nearly no cost. Mind telling exactly why it costs $40 and takes 3-5 days to send any amount of money (an instruction to modify a SINGLE NUMBER somewhere.... mere bytes)? It's bullshit with current technology - time to move on, and hopefully bitcoin and ripple can make that happen.

Edit:
In other words, I see ripple as a tool to support the movement of existing (Current and future) currencies, fiat, crypto, whatever. Ideally, I'd love to see everyone using bitcoin. But if that wet dream doesn't happen, I can settle with paying fiat for things using a ripple based network as long as the 2.75% for nothing bank fees do not apply.

It says they have no ripples available.

Ripple is not a competitor, it competes on the same ground as Paypal or OKPAY, and this post should be moved elsewhere.

Ripple seems to be so slow in launching, I really wonder if it can be a threat to Bitcoin at all

bitstamp. i think you can still just go to buy / sell > buy ripples and fund a wallet that way.

I was interested in obtaining some XRP, but apparently that is incredibly difficult. Every site I tried either wasn't currently processing anything or gave me an error even though I filled out everything correctly. Can anyone direct me to a site that actually works for buying them, because I really don't feel like begging people on ripple forums for 100XRP. Thanks in advance.

There are Chinese gateways, not sure if they are classic BTC exchanges too.

is there any chinese Bitcoin exchange which supports ripple?

And difference between trusting BTX exchanges is?

You can only rip off people that have granted you a trust line. Trust equals revolving credit and credit entails credit risk. It's no different than with parking money at a bank or exchange. If the counterparty steals your money, or has his server hacked, you're out of luck. This is the same thing as with TF and inputs.io.

With traditional exchanges you open an account and incur risk whenever you deposit money with that exchange. In Ripple, generating an account doesn't create risk, just as it doesn't with Bitcoin, because there isn't a counterparty, there's the distributed ledger instead. The thing that creates risk is establishing a trust line, which is very similar to opening an account at the counterparty's private little bank.

more like a potential scammer to scammer network no? You trust me to trust them and together we will rip everyone else off.

No it isn't. It's a peer to peer network, both the client and server are open source, anyone can run a validator, anyone can choose the set of validators they want to synchronise with and anyone can act as a gateway, either professionally or informally between trusted associates.

The implementation you are talking about is centralized. I am doing a completely decentralized version with payments with only localized information about users and thus, a high level of anonymity:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announce-zero-reserve-a-distributed-bitcoin-exchange-295930
Also no gateways and pre-mined currency

In fact we should stop calling the principle of trust chains Ripple, because Ripple is just Hawala by another name and Hawala is at least 1000 years older. The only real difference to Hawala is that Ripple uses computers.

No one needs to trust you, but you could decide to trust a gateway. Do bear in mind that this really means trust, it means you are willing to make payments on behalf on others in exchange for IOUs issued by that gateway. Don't establish a trust line that is higher than you trust them to repay you or than you're willing to lose. You'll likely want to trust them for a lot less than your bank.

It's pretty confusing though.  I can't do anything on my account because I don't have any credit. I can't buy any credit either... Someone needs to trust me before I can do anything... Seems limited to me.

Ripple itself is a distributed P2P exchange. It doesn't have a lot of liquidity yet, but it is a bona fide distributed exchange. That addresses one of the greatest weaknesses of the bitcoin ecosystem. But it *helps* Bitcoin in that respect, because it allows you to trade between bitcoin and any other currency.


It's a matter of robustness of the ecosystem and resilience against repression.

When people I know need to take payment, they want dollars (or local currency), not bitcoin. If Ripple can facilitate that cheaply, instantly and securely, I'm all for that. The usefulness of Ripple doesn't have much to do with bitcoin.

One cool aspect is that you can see the total bitstamp funds held on ripple (current bitstamp gateway cap is $357k USD and 2,703 BTC). Before ripple, the only other way you could estimate the total USD or BTC funds on an exchange was by adding up the total bids and asks visible on the order book. When an exchange becomes a ripple gateway, it gets more transparent. Its pretty neat being able to watch the total fiat funds moving in and out through ripple (kind of like the early excitement i had watching btc transactions move around on the blockchain at bitcoinmonitor.com). Its as if you worked at the bank and had access to bitstamp bank account records (just a partial view though - only the fund movement through ripple). IMO the gateway cap is also a very useful indicator for speculating, both on BTC price but even moreso on XRP price. e.g. if bitstamp.USD is being redeemed and deposited back to bitstamp, then somebody is probably planning to buy BTC (and vise-versa XRP).

lol, it has the word "rip"(off) in its name.

r.i.p.