Topic: Ripple or Bitcoin - page 39. (Read 34110 times)

You're missing all of my points. We aren't trying to take advantage of Joe Regular, we're trying to provide him with something truly valuable. If we succeed, the value of BTC goes up, if we fail it goes down.

Also, better ideas are what the future is built on. We can have those ideas, and earn new capital based on making them a reality. I'm not an idealist, this is how civilization really works right now. I'm not even saying that I'm a fan of it.

I know i shouldn't post on here, but well, this thread has been spoiled so much at this point that it doesn't matter anymore, so i might as well try to make it more entertaining.



That's more a Ripple's way of thinking. Bitcoin was not created to take advantage of "Joe Regular". Enrichment of early adopters at the expense of Joe is a collateral damage and would have been avoided if there had been any way to avoid it. There isn't.



That's so "american". One sentence: "let's make this Bitcoin Ponzi scheme bigger so we can all get richer!". Next one: "Let's make the world a better place together! Let's fix what isn't broken!".
Mix the two together and you get a recipe for disaster.

Honestly, I'd have serious reservations about trying to pitch the opportunity of Bitcoin mining to Joe Regular.

You're right that anybody can buy even $5 worth of Bitcoin. The question is: WHY will they buy Bitcoin?

How to convince Joe Regular to buy them and use them? He knows about them. He's watching the ticker. Getting them is easy. Using them is easy-ish. Why isn't he buying? Shouldn't the price of Bitcoin be $200 or $500 by now? It's not, because he's not buying.

People won't trade in the FED and/or wtvr amount of sovereignty comes from a national currency for the fucking novelty of it. They need MANY MORE reasons why Bitcoin is great!

Ripple, a threat to Bitcoin? Let a few people pitch it that way if they want. I think the idea is ridiculous. The space is huge, and there's room for many innovative solutions. Bitcoin's competition is the USD, EUR, YEN, etc... Not Ripple. Slanderers of Ripple are shooting themselves in the foot.

They'll only see it as inequitable if they believe your false assertions.  You have no idea how much Bitcoin's Silk Road, Voorhees, Ver, Satoshi or anyone else has.  "A few others" is an understatement to say the least.  How is the distribution of Bitcoin less than XRP, the vast majority of which is held by one corporation and its funders?

Equality in this context is complete crap anyway.  In all business ventures the creators and early adopters will always have an unequal share.  There's roughly another 10M BTC to be mined, no one is stopping anyone from grabbing their fair share.  Like I keep pointing out to you, the reaction you're getting is due to how you're spinning your answers.  You're not talking about the 10M BTC that's out there in the free market for anyone to obtain or that you can obtain free Bitcoin from numerous sites.  You're telling people they need to upfront $130, which isn't true, you can easily buy $1 of BTC as you can $1 of XRP.  And you could actually buy something with that $1 in BTC, the $1 in XRP only allows you to activate your account.

I don't know if you're genuinely trying to pitch both technologies to "newbs" or not, but if you are, I'm trying to show you why you're getting a more positive response to one over the other.  It has nothing to do with the technology, it has everything to do with your pitch.

Does the one laptop with all 5000 of the RIPou's, XRPs, and ledgers get left to either:
 (a) get ruined because it is a laptop surrounded by steam
 (b) get stolen by the staff/CIA/FSB
 (c) Well a happened, but saying b happened sounds cooler, then delete everything, followed by OMGWTFBBQ there's crayons in the psych ward?

Yeah, it's silliness. One of the major differences between Bitcoin and the systems most people would compare Bitcoin to is that Bitcoin is much more anonymous. This makes it perfectly reasonable to describe Bitcoin as "anonymous" in a brief description or as a tag line. To call people "liars" or "frauds" because of such a description would be lunacy. Of course, anyone who wants the details can easily find out precisely how anonymous or not-anonymous Bitcoin is.

Yeah but if I am a goverment I can go to that node, and then to the next one until I find the right one. Under a deep packet inspection regime like china does it isn't even necessary to do this physically. And when I have seized the computer from which the transaction was sent I have cryptographic proof that the transaction was sent from somebody controlling it.

The IP address is not a reliable indicator of the original sender, because there is no way to know if the node sending you the transaction originated it, or if it is merely relaying.

Well Bitcoin calls itself anonymous, but then the transaction history is not only public but also necessarily so. And then when a node makes a transaction it does so using a ip address which is in one way or the other tied to the identity of the user. Can I call Bitcoin a fraud now?
What will it be when the beta ends or the ripple daemon is released before that?

It's worth pointing out that a surprisingly large number of networks follow a power-law distribution. That is to say that in Bitcoin, a few people will have disproportionately large balances while the remainder are spread out on the "long tail."

I was hyperbolizing to make the point that many newbs will find the true distribution of the money supply highly inequitable.

Ripple, still in beta, with it's "conditionally shared source", is yet immune to such concerns. Ask yourself: Will people really care?

I think the odds are that Ripple will work. Bitcoin works, yet now has chances of dying, which can be lessened by the diligence of members of this forum.

No. The traditional way to call that which bills itself X but does not deliver X is fraud. There's no need to invent three word compounds to describe fraudulent enterprises. Yes, I get that fraudsters would very much like to, and I get why, too. Makes no difference.


This is because you're an idiot. IQ 80 and over has no trouble with this task.


Putrid lies. The sort you spin.


Yes indeed, very popular. Since the Uppity Tortilla goon went away all we have to entertain ourselves with is you bunch of idiots.

Granted, that guy had you lot beaten with one hand behind his back, but then again not everybody is born with the gift.

Speaking of which, perhaps it's time to organize a Ripple Sauna Conference, for Ripple SuperCorporations (1.5 through 5 or w/e).

Response to what?  I don't recall having a lengthy discussion with you so maybe you can point me to the thread you feel I'm avoiding. 

Nothing I said was erroneous.  Ripple facilitates IOU's between multiple parties.  IOU's = Debt.  There are zero repayment terms to these IOU's.  It doesn't matter if Ripple was built to track loans, Ripple is the facilitator of the loan.

It' just as accurate as this:


Which was my point.  He's purposely skewing his responses to show his own bias.

This has been pointed out to our prophet more than once, but he never responds, yet he keeps repeating the charge. Maybe he thinks people won't notice.

This is totally wrong. Ripple is not a system for keeping track of loans. Ripple debts are not the same as mortgage / loan debt. This is a common misconception!

The average person would probably listen to you for a little while before turning away to go back about their business, holding no opinion one way or the other on Ripple, and having gained virtually no understanding.

I agree with you that Bitcoin needs to continue to be evolved to be more user friendly for the average user but I think we've come great lengths in that aspect over the last few years.  As for the dialogue, your responses are rather biased and spun in a way to purposefully turn off a person looking at Bitcoin and entice someone looking at Ripple.  It's not difficult to do.

Q: "Who's got all those 100B Ripples?"
A: "A single for-profit organization holds the majority share.  Their profitability model is based on the appreciation of XRP and also control the distribution of said XRP."

Q: "Can I get some?"
A: "Sure, first you sign up for Ripple, which you can't use because you need XRP.  Then you need to sign up for a gateway and go through their approval process.  Then you want to fund the gateway with fiat.  Then you transfer the fiat to Ripple and place a bid to purchase XRP..."

Q: "What's the point of Ripple?"
A: "To loan money to another person with no repayment terms, interest, or any other sort of traditional terms, including legal recourse, you would receive when extending credit.  If you accept this rather significant counter-party risk, you can move DEBT all over the world."

What would be the average reaction if you spun it this way?  

Who?




I love it when someone heavily invested in Bitcoin calls Ripple "putrid". You probably don't realize the negative effect you're having on Bitcoin. This is a popular thread.
I remain unconvinced MPOE isn't independently shilling for Ripple because he believes Bitcoin will fail.


When I speak to newbs about Bitcoin:

Q: "Who's got all those 11M Bitcoins?"
A: "Some impolite guy in Eastern Europe running an underground asset market, BF members like Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver, an anonymous hacker(s) we're supposed to love because he/they wrote a good program, a few others."

Q: "Can I get some bitcoins?"
A: "You can buy them for ~$130."

Q: "What's the point of using Bitcoin?"
A: "You can send money all over the world pseudonymously, and it's a nifty store of value."

Average overall reaction: luke warm, unconvinced

About Ripple:

Q: "Who's got all those 100B Ripples?"
A: "OpenCoin Inc., But they're being given away gradually to massive amounts of people."

Q: "Can I get some?"
A: "You can buy ripples for ~$0.02, or easily get the amount you need to transact on the network for free for life by asking someone on a forum/chat."

Q: "What's the point of Ripple?"
A: "You will be able to send money all over the world, and the recipients will receive money in their preferred currency."

Average overall reaction: intrigue, they are convinced of real world utility


The above is true DESPITE the fact that Bitcoin works, and Ripple is in beta (alpha?). This line of dialogue matters. The systems of tomorrow will be the ones adopted BY THE MASSES. They don't know anything about hashing algorithms, and they simply don't care. Bitcoin has a PR problem.

Over time if Bitcoin doesn't sell itself and its features well, nobody new will buy into it. Quite frankly, in the eyes of the public it's just not as revolutionary we think it is. We have to avoid it simply being viewed as an unstable fringe currency for criminals. We must bridge the gap between techie/Libertarian/serious people and Joe Regular who uses ebay and paypal and maybe owns a bit of silver/gold as investment.

Ripple doesn't ask its users to "buy in" to XRP, it simply provides a math-based payment solution. It's Bitcoin that must watch its image as the "scam with a frosting of putrid".

Ripple only handles IOU's and their own crypto-currency or whatever you want to call it, which is not subject to FinCEN.  There's no exchange of actual fiat, in order to do that, you need to go through a gateway so I think the onus would be on the gateway to follow KYC and AML procedures.