Topic: Ripple SOUNDS nice but there are some MAJOR problems - page 5. (Read 7025 times)

Looking over the documentation (https://ripple.com/wiki/) there is a lot of information about the protocol that is not explained. There is certainly nowhere nearly enough information to produce a competing implementation. A lot of important details are swept under the rug. For example, in "How it works", it is claimed that "Ledgers are really hash trees". No further explanation is given.

This nonsense is repeated all over the documentation, with promises that "mathematical proofs are coming soon."

Here's the high-level view on why our algorithm is stable:

1) Every honest node wants a consensus. They will wait as long as it takes in order to get one. We have no fixed amount of time in which a consensus must be reached.

2) There is no moving target during a consensus window. With respect to establishing that consensus, the world is frozen. There is a fixed amount of information to be known about the state, and more information is always gathered by nodes. They don't forget anything. The ratcheting up of the agreement level required ensures a consensus will eventually be reached.

3) Dishonest nodes cannot stop transactions from propagating to the vast majority of honest nodes. A node would have to have every single one of its connections to a dishonest node. (And we imagine 'core' nodes agreeing to directly connect to each other as a safety.)

4) So long as a transaction can be applied to the ledger and the vast majority of nodes see it before the consensus window, there's nothing dishonest nodes can do to stop honest nodes from including it. (Nodes will extend the consensus window if they aren't getting votes or acquiring transaction sets from trusted nodes that have voted.)

5) If a transaction does not get into a consensus set, but is valid, every honest node that has seen that transaction will vote to include it in the next consensus set.

6) No honest node particularly cares what's in the consensus set, provided it includes transactions that were seen well before the consensus window started. There is no way a dishonest party could get something into the transaction set that shouldn't be there and have that cause any harm. Invalid transactions will have no effect, even if they get in the consensus set.

It is said that the ledger achieves consensus between decentralized nodes without proof of work (a bold claim) and yet, no step by step algorithm is provided. The closest it comes to anything resembling detail is that a transaction is either "passed", "soft failed", or "hard failed." With no other information provided. Answers to important questions, like how Ripple peers are discovered, the messages passed between nodes, who manages the central list of "unique nodes" (for every client's UNL) are totally missing.

Looking over the Ripple forum and reading some parts of the wiki, it seems that Ripple credits ("XRPs") are distributed by hand by the administrators of the system? In what way is this decentralized?

In the other Ripple thread, people are fawning over this rubbish like it's the second coming of Jesus. I suspect these are non technical individuals who have fallen in love with the idea (which is decent) but don't have any inkling of whether or not it can work at the technical level.

We know that XRP have value because it says right in the wiki that they can be traded for other currencies. They are just another currency unit according to the interface.

I don't think that you know that either since, as you pointed out, not all details are explained.

XRP aren't an asset as Bitcoin, their main function is to avoid spam on the network.

I won't be surprised if there will be the possibility to have more than 100 billion XRP in the future if they are needed.

XRP aren't an asset as Bitcoin, their main function is to avoid spam on the network.

I won't be surprised if there will be the possibility to have more than 100 billion XRP in the future if they are needed.

Did you know that there is a hard limit of only 500 million accounts?

Aren't reserve requirements, like transaction fees, modifiable?

I still think that you overreact a lot when saying that is has "MAJOR problems"

I disagree. There's enough there to where you can create your own client that functions similarly to Bitcoin. It might not have binary compatibility (i.e. the messages passed between peers may not be compatible, and the format of the blocks would probably be different). But all of the "difficult" problems are explained in the paper and this is the guts of Bitcoin.

Compare this with Ripple, where every "difficult" problem is just swept under the rug with a non-explanation in the wiki.

Yeah, well, it doesn't contain "every intricate detail" and it isn't "enough information to produce a competing implementation".

Agreed. Here's the original paper, published in 2008:

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Every revolutionary idea is explained, along with an analysis. This is completely absent for Ripple.

If you wanna make a fair comparison you should compare it to how complete the documentation of Bitcoin was in 2009.

Yeah nice job stating the obvious. Bitcoin is also in beta and yet we know about every intricate detail.