Topic: Ripple SOUNDS nice but there are some MAJOR problems (Read 7082 times)

When you are out in a boat on the water, a ripple sounds nice. But when the boat has holes in it, there is a major problem.

 

Perhaps the lack of full decentralization is one of the most popular criticisms of Ripple.

For beginners this does not seem such a big problem. However, for the "veterans" of the industry, decentralization is very important. Proponents of decentralized crypto-currencies consider the Internet to be an exemplary decentralized system: the flow of information flows is free and open (with some restrictions) in the absence of a single governing body.

At the same time, the other part of the crypto community is ready to put up with concentrated management, since the reverse, in their opinion, is inefficient. The developers of Ripple recognize that XRP works somewhat differently than the same bitcoyne, and is not as decentralized as they would like. But has XRP become the best form of digital money than bitcoin?

I don't think it will even be able to function as a store of value. As stated below: Bitcoin's supply is infinitely expandable; Ripple's supply is infinitely renewable.

A bad analogy would compare Bitcoin to voltage and Ripple to current.

There is no known mechanism for transacting Bitcoins off the blockchain that doesn't itself require a central authority (to hold the signing keys that would release the bitcoins). You wind up with horrible solutions like each Ripple transaction requiring a Bitcoin transaction. You also have the problem of whether you destroy the bitcoins or pay them to someone. If you pay them to someone who is not a central authority, the scheme can be rigged by someone who puts themselves on both sides.

Thanks for the answer. The reason why the server is not opensourced makes sense.

I've another question: 

5. Why was XRP developed while Bitcoin would have been enough to prevent transaction spam? (requires a tiny fraction of a bitcoin to send a transaction, take that from the value being sent, even if that value is not in bitcoin)

I think that's exactly the point.. XRP is not meant to be a store of value.. its the oil that keeps the Ripple system going.  Maybe it'll go up or maybe it'll stay extremely low for ever.. its really at the whim of OpenCoin and the devs who hold the majority.. but you don't have to worry because its not a store of value like Bitcoin.

I haven't seen your opinion on something that seems like an obvious flaw in using XRP as a store of value: lowering the account reserve, which must happen from time to time due to growth and lost/used up XRP, will unlock large amounts of XRP and lower the price. This would happen suddenly and not according to any fixed schedule, unlike Bitcoin block rewards. Why would I want to store value in XRP when I can easily convert it to BTC and avoid this?

Yeah, sorry. My crystal ball isn't any clearer than yours anyway. I don't pretend to be able to predict what will happen.

I love how everything gets answered except this one.

As soon as the network is distributed, changes can only be made by consensus. By intentional design, logic changes are difficult to do and require establishing and maintaining a consensus on the change. You wouldn't want someone quickly pushing through a change that, for example, allowed issuers to delete IOUs!

Right now, Opencoin is acting as a central authority and running the network. This makes it much easier to fix problems and make changes quickly. We're fixing issues on a daily basis now and slowing that pace would mean a much longer time before Ripple is a decentralized payment system that people can truly rely upon.

Not any time soon. That's why we're promoting Ripple as a payment network with gateways rather than as a community credit network. I personally believe that community credit is Ripple's long-term killer app and that it will change the way people think about money. So this will always be there and maybe one day it will really catch on. Social money may take social changes, just like social media did. Those changes happened pretty fast, so maybe these will too. It will take better tools to make managing credit more user friendly. We hope to get there, but we aren't relying on it happening soon. The bigger Ripple becomes, the higher the chances this will happen.

Yes, however, we've run into some technical problems designing a usable and safe namespace scheme. The fundamental problem is not having a central authority that approves names but also not having the first person to register names like eBay and Amazon being able to hold them hostage.

The best solution we could come up with is this:

1) Anyone can create a namespace.

2) The client can use any namespace.

3) Opencoin will create a namespace which the client uses by default.

4) Namespaces can be closed or open. They start closed. A namespace's owner can open a namespace but not close it.

5) Opencoin's namespace will be closed for a year or so. We'll come up with some fair scheme to register names. (Yuck.)

6) After a year, we'll open our namespace and it will be first come, first served.

The problem is that this is kind of fake decentralization. If someone tries to create a competing namespace, payments may go to the wrong person. So as a practical matter, we'll run the namespace, and we don't want to do that. We don't want to be Ripple's IANA.

We have a hard rule that we won't implement something until we find a good way to decentralize it. We're not there yet on friendly names.

We do have a domain-based naming scheme because that can be decentralized. Domains can vouch for their ownership of particular account records. You retrieve a domain's configuration file using SSL.

For example, this is bitstamp's main account:


Notice the "Domain" field? That's hex for "bitstamp.net". If you retrieve https://bistamp.net/ripple.txt, you get:


This establishes a reliable proof that the domain belongs to the "bitstamp.net" domain.

Hello,

I'm quite interested in Ripple (see http://ploum.net/post/ripple-making-bitcoin-easier-or-obsolete ) but, besides the technical questions, I would like to ask some non-technical questions:

1. Why isn't the server opensourced yet.


2. Do you really expect people to make a list of person they trust or person they don't?


3. Paying still requires a user unfriendly address like: rKXFsg5EuG4BzLxdTBFXJq2a6iNfyx1hRX  Is there any plan to make it friendlier? (like allowing to send money to an email address by allowing people to make an alias?)


4. XRP is a currency but XRP is not. Hum… If XRP is working as well as advertized, what would be the reason to keep bitcoins?


Thanks

I gotta say, I was digging through the source code of the Ripple client last night and the client alone is quite complex and must have taken a lot of development, I think its easy to underestimate how much work that simple clean web based UI has taken under the hood.

I can't even begin to imagine the amount of development time and complex problems that have been solved within the rippled c++ server.

Given the assumed limited developer resources and the amount of work that has been put into the server and client, i'm actually surprised the wiki and website for that matter are as detailed as they are.  Even if there are some vagities in the doco, I take my hat off to the Ripple team for their work so far.

With only 2-4 developers they must have been working on this for at least 12-24 months.

I would cut them some slack, since their product is new. Having a good idea is sometimes hard to explain, especially when technology seems to be moving at light-speed.


At the same time, to remain balanced, its good to remember:

I'm interested in this Ripple-related question:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/can-ripple-facilitate-business-to-business-barter-transactions-144468

I think 1XRP = 0.0001USD sounds like a nice place to start.. Gives the devs $100k USD worth of XRP to
reward them for their hard work . Cheap enough everyone gets to play.

Look:

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=89

See what I mean?

I doubt it, but you never know.

People in the Ripple forum, and a personal friend of mine, are acting like they think that XRP are going to skyrocket in value in a fashion comparable to Bitcoin. I think that the user interface of the Ripple web application encourages this view point as well, with the XRP/BTC currency pair.