Topic: ripple: let's test it! - page 4. (Read 43943 times)

Then you don't use any Bitcoin exchanges, since they also just give you IOUs?

With Ripple, people can use any currency they choose, and the recipient can receive this payment in any currency they choose. All in a matter of seconds and free. Ripple allows you and I to trade peer-to-peer for anything of value, without a central clearing house or central exchange.

Hey guys...

I've just been importing my old ripple account into https://wallet.gatehub.net.

I have some XRP, but also some debts (in USD and BTC) because people (who are probably mainly here) extended trust to me and they own IOUs of mine in these currencies.

I saw that some of them have sizable XRP balances in their accounts. Maybe you guys wanna check?

Before I settle those debts, I'd like to make sure people have access to those accounts, so I'll probably search for the account addresses and try to contact the owners...

Fidor Bank AG und Ripple Labs kooperieren im Bereich des digitalen Zahlungsverkehrs München (ots) - Die Fidor Bank AG (www.fidor.de) und Ripple Labs (www.ripplelabs.com) kündigen die Zusammenarbeit im Bereich des digitalen Zahlungsverkehrs an. Die Fidor Bank wird die erste Bank sein, die das sogenannte Ripple Protokoll (www.ripple.com) einsetzen wird. Das Ripple-Zahlungsprotokoll ermöglicht kostengünstige und nahezu Realtime-Zahlungen in allen Währungen - ganz gleich ob gesetzliche oder virtuelle.

In der ersten Ausbaustufe wird den deutschen Endkunden der Fidor Bank eine "Pay Out Möglichkeit" über Ripple angeboten. Dieses Angebot ermöglicht den sekundenschnellen Geldtransfer in andere Länder zu anderen Ripple-Usern. Die Preise hierfür werden sehr wettbewerbsfähig sein. Die technischen Integrationsarbeiten haben bereits begonnen.

Zudem will die Fidor Bank Ripple zukünftig als einen Zahlungsweg zwischen Fidor Bank Länder-Einheiten einsetzen.

"Ripple ändert die Spielregeln für Finanzdienstleister, indem es den Versand und die Abrechnung in Echtzeit in jeder Währung ermöglicht - dies führt zur Stärkung der Kundenbeziehung, insbesondere bei den digital Natives", sagte Chris Larsen, CEO von Ripple Labs. "Als Innovationsführer im digitalen Banking verwendet die Fidor Bank Ripple als eine neue Option, um ihren Kunden eine innovative Möglichkeit des internationalen digitalen Zahlungsverkehrs anzubieten."

Ripple ist ein offenes, dezentrales Zahlungsprotokoll, das es ermöglicht, durch ein globales Protokoll unterschiedliche gesetzliche und virtuelle Währungen, wie z.B. Bitcoins zu versenden. Mit Ripple werden Fidor-Kunden Überweisungen in jeder Währung zu sehr konkurrenzfähigen Preisen bei der Fidor Bank schnell aufgeben und verschicken können. Dabei werden die Fidor-Kunden voraussichtlich keinen separaten Ripple-Account eröffnen müssen.

Sobald mehr Finanzinstitute Ripple einführen, wird zudem die Fidor Bank in der Lage sein, Transaktionen mit solchen Instituten zu günstigeren Gebühren und mit schnelleren Laufzeiten durchzuführen.

Matthias Kröner, CEO der Fidor Bank AG: " Mit Ripple werden wir unseren Kunden in Deutschland einen sehr günstigen und extrem schnellen globalen Geldtransfer anbieten. Wir ermöglichen unseren Kunden die Vorteile eines digitalen Netzwerks auch mit ihrem Bankkonto zu nutzen, um so Ihren digitalen Lebensstil optimal zu unterstützen. Darüber hinaus unterstützt diese Kooperation die internationale Roll-out Vorgehensweise der Fidor Bank AG."

Have read a lot around here from people totally pro and people totally against Ripple. The fight appears to be going on and well-rooted in the wider Bitcoin space (and has all the characteristics of your everyday internet-war as we know them since way back in the day when people were fighting via FidoNet, gopher or early Usenet groups)...

At the risk of repeating things already gotten at somewhere in this thread (I admit having read only relevant portions and certainly not the whole thing to the t), to me it appears that Ripple is both a chance for Bitcoin and an un-welcome thing at the same time, to be summed up roughly like this:

  - Ripple may help adoption of general Crypto coin technologies by the masses
  - it may open doors with conventional financial institutions as these "think" in terms of "trusted central authorities" (because they haven't got the first thing about DE-centralised P2P Cryptos)
  - may complement Bitcoin use cases, funding/withdrawals, moving in and out by adding more ways of "interfacing" between fiat and Crypto,
  - may spawn better user-friendliness (and hence incentives of adoption by dumb users whom are ultimately needed to make this a success -- like it or hate it, but this is similar to that wave of AOL idiots who jumped onto the Net back in 1992-4); as a commercial central point of control, Ripple Labs, Inc. will see to it that things become easier to handle and dummy-proof; that, in turn, may influence Bitcoin improvements just like Formula-1 racing is said to bring innovation to everyone's Honda Civics ;)
  - may help with appeasing yesterday's government bureaucrats (who are pushing us around today though) and help proving that Bitcoin is not just a thing for gangsters, pornography, terrorism, and gambling (just as the general internet has overcome the same kind of smearing)
  - may help taking business away from banking monopolies and evading artificial barriers of entry

  - Ripple will, at the same time, move a certain volume of business from one monopoly to another controlled environment; this will not help in the medium or long run
  - it may turn out to be an interregnum and have a limited lifespan once people realise that REAL open and P2P-distributed systems are superior
  - it may harbour Crypto-illiterate users for some time to come (just like Windoze or AOL continue to appeal to dumb users in droves today), but we don't actually need them to move forward anyway
  - Ripple will try to "rule the world" and maybe try to limit real Cryptos one way or the other (just as Apple are increasingly showing their real face by censoring-away Cryptos because of their vested interest in some ridiculous iTunes payment system); both won't do any good in the long run to the respective malfeasants but still have a potential to make life miserable for the rest of us (nothing new here)
  - because of its partly-centralised built, it will be subjected to regulatory requirements more than Bitcoin
  - Ripple will turn out to be just another kind of "currency" in a world of competing currencies (now a reality, just a dream a very short time ago). Everyone truly **understanding** competing currencies, free markets, and competition need not worry about this; also, bear in mind that, beyond just the 1.5bn or so of us, the rest of the world (roughly 6.5bn) will tend to vote with their feet for truly open and decentralised Crypto coins.

Testing Ripple, yes, why not -- but it should not be taken for a substitute for Bitcoin or other Crypto coins, only kind of complementing it in a few ways.

What do you mean by "real open"? ::)

Ripple is released under a license that is even more permissive than the one used by Bitcoin (ISC vs. MIT). You seem to confuse Ripple (the network) with XRP ("ripples), the currency.

I know, but this doesn't even give you privacy. I think the old RipplePay used a centralised server. In this way, you didn't need banks, though you did need a central party for bookkeeping. In the new Ripple, you no longer need a central bookkeeping server, and you still do not need banks, but you need both centralised bookkeeping and a gateway if you want privacy.

Anonymity is not a design goal of Ripple. 

I've finally managed to stumble across something that appears to be a real weakness of Ripple: privacy.

IIUIC, out of the box Ripple offers very little privacy. Each account has a single address, so once someone you've transacted with knows your address, they can see your entire financial history. Or at least, they can see the amounts, since they might now know the real world identities behind the addresses of the counterparties. In the case of governments the situation is even worse, since governments can be expected to be able to hoover up large numbers of identified addresses.

While Ripple does support account families with multiple addresses, which are similar to deterministic Bitcoin wallets, the standard client doesn't appear to offer any support for it. More worryingly, trust lines run between addresses, not account families, and it is hard to see how this could be different given that there is a public ledger. This wouldn't matter for XRP transactions, but fiat transactions rely on it.

Hosted wallets can provide privacy, but that does mean you have to rely on intermediaries to get privacy, which isn't very desirable.

So, am I missing something, or is this a major weakness?

  - Ripple will, at the same time, move a certain volume of business from one monopoly to another controlled environment; this will not help in the medium or long run

- it may turn out to be an interregnum and have a limited lifespan once people realise that REAL open and P2P-distributed systems are superior

- it may harbour Crypto-illiterate users for some time to come (just like Windoze or AOL continue to appeal to dumb users in droves today), but we don't actually need them to move forward anyway

- Ripple will try to "rule the world" and maybe try to limit real Cryptos one way or the other (just as Apple are increasingly showing their real face by censoring-away Cryptos because of their vested interest in some ridiculous iTunes payment system); both won't do any good in the long run to the respective malfeasants but still have a potential to make life miserable for the rest of us (nothing new here)

- because of its partly-centralised built, it will be subjected to regulatory requirements more than Bitcoin

- Ripple will turn out to be just another kind of "currency" in a world of competing currencies (now a reality, just a dream a very short time ago). Everyone truly **understanding** competing currencies, free markets, and competition need not worry about this; also, bear in mind that, beyond just the 1.5bn or so of us, the rest of the world (roughly 6.5bn) will tend to vote with their feet for truly open and decentralised Crypto coins.

Testing Ripple, yes, why not -- but it should not be taken for a substitute for Bitcoin or other Crypto coins, only kind of complementing it in a few ways.