Topic: Ripple is excellent, but short-sighted. (Read 10509 times)

Where? When? What dimension do you speak of?

Ripple is imho a huge success so far, so I'm not sure what you are talking about. You have a screwed up opinion of the value of past failures. Talk to any successful innovator and they will tell you of failures leading to success.

You make it sound like XRP is hard to come by. Go buy some for cheap if you want some for some reason.

Meh. I trust them today, and maybe if we don't trust them tomorrow we fork the network and roll on with some sort of Ripple 3.0. I'm mostly concerned with what can make the world a better place right now. Not so much about "fairness" according to the Bitcoin community (lol), minor technical issues, or speculation about what technology might exist in the future.

Money in ripple system is debt money... We already have that in the world! IT SUCKS!

XRP in ripple are only sound money. Ripple is centralized and closed source. It has yet to prove itself. We need to wait for them to open source fully.

Everything has the potential to be very big. Farts for instance. When you sit down to take a shit, the doogie has the potential to be very big. So what of it? What difference does it make that you take one large dump or a few smaller ones? Other than, you know, the former might be a little painful.


Your statement was:


Do you even know what the fuck words mean at all?

That aside: the idea is that you can acquire these "stamps" for next to nothing in some place and then redeem them for more later. This is the engine driving whatever scrawny speculation is occuring in XRP, other than the insiders pumping it up.

There's no value, utility or convenience delivered by Ripple. Perhaps there will be at some future point, but almost certainly not by a system run by the current people involved (it's very amusing to note how pretty much all Bitcoin's ambitious failures, from Caleb to Katz gravitate towards this new thing, in the ultimately vain hope that they were pushed aside in Bitcoin for any other reason than because they're stupid, worthless failures).

I think that Ripple has the potential to be very big - and I'm sure that many on these forums agree, and that's exactly why we are criticizing it so harshly, because many bitcoiners do not like a future in which Ripple has achieved widespread adoption.

Leaving aside the fatal flaws (trust and debt) inherent also to the conventional financial system, the premine of Ripple's crypto (XRP) it is also a huge drawback.

From one side inflation is built into Bitcoin to pay miners which actively work for the network, and this system has demonstrated to be rock solid in the past 3 years, as it also creates a strong "real" economy related to the core function of the currency, all of which strengthens the network. On the contrary, I can't really get what will be the incentive of validators to participate in the Ripple network if there is no mining whatsoever (never seen a real explanation on this point).

From the other side, the fact that Opencoin controls ALL the XRP feels like a very opportunistic way to profit from Bitcoin's genius idea, while taking out from the equation many of the Bitcoin revolutionary aspects. Joel seems to agree that trust-based system=bad money, and he says he hopes that Ripple will be just a first step towards a "trust-free" monetary future. Unfortunately this is a complete fallacy because they will do whatever suits them best with the whole supply of the "trust-free" currency inside Ripple. What I mean is that you actually need to put a lot of trust in Opencoin to use XRP, because that level of premining and general lack of transparency de facto kills the decentralized and trust-free concepts.

Or probably they should have designed differently, at least making a valid attempt at fairness so that people can be confident that they are in for the betterment of the network, rather than "pump and dump", right now it just look dodgy in every way.

Well If opencoin gives away this many XRP not only they gonna run out sooner than it would take for ripple to become popular, but also the wealth would be concentrated within this community which I don't think they want.

If a train is about to leave, it would be fair enough for the train operator to put the timetable at somewhere publicly visible, they have no duty to pay big bucks to the post office to have the table mailed to everyone's home, in fact, I doubt if they had done that, you would probably still had thrown it into the trashcan, consider it spam-mail.

"Fairness" is about you do as much as you can, with your current resource, to get the access to your currency out to as many people as possible, Opencoin can at the blink of an eye start giving away all of their XRPs(or even better, sell them!), yet they refuse to do that.

If I did know about and were subscribed to the cypherpunks mailing list, had the knowledge to implement a miner and the necessary computing resources.

I agree that XRP are risky, it's the same kind of risk as with BTC just amplified, but I think the potential gain is there to compensate. If I am wrong, well it's like missing on somebody giving me 1000 bucks, which is unfortunate but not really dramatic.

Well, I hold ~50k XRP that I did not create for myself but that I got as an "early adopter" for free which I consider "my portion of XRPs".

Satoshi on the other hand probably mostly mined at a loss or completely voluntarily, as there was for quite some time no way at all to spend BTC anywhere. Just like the famous "10k BTC pizza" which was sold under value at that time by the way.

I already saw some threads about forking Ripple to remove XRP - please just make sure to include some other kind of non-IOU currency in there (which as I said could be Bitcoin/Litecoin/...coin), a Ripple system without an intermediate currency will search for one and if that intermediate currency turns out to be a heavily centralized IOU, there are even more issues than with XRP, which at least are not IOUs.

I agree that the distribution of XRP is one of the main issues I see in Ripple too, on the other hand they are so cheap to begin with that this is a rather philosophical concern. I would be happy if all I would ever need to pay to make millions of transactions in the future on a payment network would only cost me a 1/10th of what I pay for my credit card per year alone.

You know what, you could have mined all those 1 million bitcoins, and leave not even bread crumbs to Satoshi, this is called "fairness".

And I don't hate XRPs, I just think it's a suckers' investment, you can ask any investor out of this community if they are going to invest in something which a single entity controls 10 times more than everyone else combined, they will call you crazy.

Technically yes, but for practical purposes the cost of generating them stands in no relation to the effort it took to come up with Bitcoin and write the software.
The general consensus is that Satoshi has "earned" to have them not because his mining but because his work.

All you can say that you think opencoin is too greedy for your taste. In that case you are free to fork ripple once it is released.
As for myself I consider the valuation of XRP to work like a stock which pay "dividends" by deflation. Added to this I didn't give anybody any money nor did I pay for my XRP, which I gonna keep till ripple comes out of beta.
Haters gonna hate,

This is getting old, the difference is Satoshi essentially informed everyone he talked to to mine Bitcoins, and the soruce code was released before the genesis block was even mined, someone took his advice, like Hal Finney, who mined several thousand very early, did Opencoin ever give anyone a chance to take their reserved portion of XRPs which they created out of thin air? Not to say that a Bitcoin network can only be "alive" as long as at least a miner is running, so Satoshi had to be that miner himself, because no one else wanted to do that, while Ripple network, by design, can work perfectly without XRPs.

Keyword ^


Ripple = type 1 and 0's into variable.

Big difference.

Just sain' Satoshi also generated a bunch of Bitcoins for himself.

I don't know what you mean by "spam transactions"? The problem of blockchain being filled up with too many small transactions I guess? I don't see how Ripple can solve it, the ledger can still bloat, at least with its current design.

I agree with a lot of what you said about XRPs, but what I find faults with is the way they release them, which is completely arbitrary and opaque, rather then the fact that they created a currency itself. Even if they were really out of other reasonable solutions, and had to settle with the "printing press" model(which I strongly doubt, at bare minimum they can be as transparent as FEDs and give people complete, provable data about the past/current/future rate and fluctuation of XRPs' flow into the network. All this ultra-secrecy can only lead people to be more and more suspicious that some foul plays are behind the door.

Oh, just to quickly jump in:
Bitcoin has SERIOUS issues with spam transactions and is running currently in a heavily limited mode because of that.

Bitcoin would look much different (imho better + with far more features), if it somehow could be ensured that spam transactions are not mined into the block chain. One of the biggest reasons that this hasn't happened yet, is (aside from being distributed already, so hardforks need mining power) that there is no clear consensus what "spam" exactly is.

Ripple solves this via a combination of Proof of Stake (or maybe Proof of Ownership) and Proof of Destruction.


XRP are used (or probably intended to be used) as an intermediate currency/token/whateveryoucallit. Just like it is easier to give an USD value to several computer parts and compare this instead of calculating how many ASUS ... mainboards I have to trade for 3 Intel core-i5 ... CPUs it is intended to be used for comparisons and facilitating trade. Same goes for using BTC at the moment by the way - as most goods and services can be valued in fiat and this fiat value can be translated into a BTC value, BTC are used as an intermediate, just like USD or EUR or BTN - the main use for money after all.

A Ripple system without an internal currency will need to adopt another currency out of necessity really fast, it could be Litecoins, it could be Bitcoin it can be something else. Without any internal currency, there can only be barter trade of IOUs and that leads to highly inefficient markets.

As there is no real need to actually USE XRP (just as I never had to use Mexican Pesos in my whole life, still I can calculate the value of nearly anything around me in Mexican Pesos!) but it is useful to have it around, so I'm not so much concerned with the whole issues that people see around this.

XXX billions XRP on your account anyways just means that you can dump the price - as long as you don't invest in them by holding and just use them to facilitate trade (meaning you do trade for example PayPalUSD --> XRP --> BTC instead of longer paths) you're not exposed to this at all.

To be clear, I am also heavily against investing in XRP (I just hold the ones I got for free and axchanged a few of them to BTC to get a better feeling for the client and system) and would recommend anyone who buys them to exchange them quickly for wheatever IOU they want to have and redeem that at the time they want to.

Why you can't wrap your mind around the facts is beyond me, and how Ripplers attribute this to envy is even more laughable.

The fact is that the only reason Bitcoin network doesn't do instant confirmation is the unfairness of distribution and security, had the miners needed not to worry about their blocks getting rejected, because all coins are generated in the genesis block anyway(like what Opencoin is doing), Bitcoin network could just have gone the WDC way by adjusting the block generation time to something like 10 or 20 seconds, and we would have near-instant confirmations without putting up with Ripple's half-assed consensus system, you really think Ripple is superior in anyway?

Fairness is everything, I wil tell you why I don't embrace it, ask any proper investor outside of this community about something like XRP, they will tell you it is suicidal to invest in something which a single entity controls 10 times more than anyone else combined, and count on their good will to make money for you, needless to say there is no way for you to investigate if the currency is being manipulated or not, heck, you don't even know how much XRP is out of Opencoin.

Had Opencoin really honored fairness and felt the need to combat spam, there are much better approaches to take, like a deterministic system which releases XRPs, while keeping the 300 XRPs limit in place(yeah, they get rid of it already), not to say the so-called "spam" problem is something unique to the Ripple, which says much about how good the design actually is.

If you still feel confused, ask yourself, where is Ripple/XRP better than the financial/federal reserve system you are using?

But nevermind, it's not the first time I see a Rippler who just can't swallow rational arguments.

The network requires XRP to have a value in order to combat spam. The price of XRP today is 99% speculative, but it's gradually becoming more real. Over time this value will increasingly be set by a new payment processing market.

Ripple can give everyone the ability to transact for free in any currency they want. OpenCoin has nothing in common with the FED. lol

Why Bitcoiners don't embrace it is beyond me. The only reason I can think of is that they assume that undermining Ripple will somehow delay the day Bitcoin is inevitably replaced by something better. It's not a rational assumption. It has everything to do with fear and greed, and nothing to do with Ripple.


I'm sure OpenCoin will attract a lot of VCs. What's your point?

Do not forget using VC money to buy up the tiny XRPs they gave away so they would have a bigger market cap.. to attract more VCs.

Had they really focused on working on a payment system(certainly not without major problems), they would not be despised so much, instead they create a currency that makes FED pales in comparison when it comed to scamability, then advertise it as if they only keep enough to reward their self-proclaimed great contributions.