Topic: Ripple: The Best Way To Legitimize Bitcoin - page 2. (Read 13113 times)

It is, the issuer is a gateway.


It is, except that it's not the gateway keeping the books, but the impartial and reliable P2P network of Ripple validators.


The signing over happens inside the Ripple network, under the supervision of the validator nodes. The gateway only deals with issuing and redeeming IOUs.


You would connect to those for sure, because that's what allows you to serve as a gateway into the Ripple system, including its distributed order book for currency exchange.


Conversely, Bitcoin doesn't add anything above and beyond Ripple, except for greater current mindshare.


A distributed order book, plus the ability to pay in any currency with any currency. Say you want to buy BTC with EUR and the seller wants to sell BTC for USD, then the system automatically matches the orders if the price matches.


Also if you both trust the same gateway, or if there is another connecting path between the two of you in the Ripple trust graph.


The distributed order book is the biggie for me.

They're still giving away XRP, though the amounts per person are coming down. And I don't think asking people to contribute CPU cycles to cancer research is a bad way to get XRP into circulation.

I'm not sure that's true. A check is more like a signed instruction to a bank isn't it? It involves three parties: the payer, the payee and the bank. A Ripple IOU on the other hand is something that can be transferred directly and then redeemed at the issuing gateway, provided it is trustworthy. It involves only two parties: the issuer and the owner.


It's similar, but in the case of a check you have two risks: the payer might not have a sufficient balance and the bank itself might be insolvent. With Ripple IOUs you have only the latter risk.


Sure, but that's because Bitcoin is a trustless currency. If you are going to use Bitcoin payments, Ripple doesn't add much. It's when you want to move fiat that Ripple gives you something Bitcoin currently doesn't. I think one major application would be buying and selling Bitcoin with fiat currencies.

You could try to "mine" the XRP at https://www.computingforgood.org/, but it's slow going. You could also buy it from someone on the internet with BTC. You only need a couple of dollars worth to last you a lifetime.


Exactly, I agree.


Spending <$5 in order to be able to open a Ripple wallet doesn't strike me as excessive. I don't know what the current reserve is, I think it's 50 XRP, which I think is about $2.50.

Sure, this is the principle of migrating to a new currency through proof of burn. You could fork Ripple and issue the fork's internal currency by provably burning BTC at a fixed conversion rate, or following some predetermined time-varying schedule.

It also holds (or controls) any IOUs you might own. The underlying asset is kept by the issuing gateway, or at least you hope that's true, and you have to trust them to redeem it for you, possibly for a fee. That's why IOUs are always linked to a specific issuer so you know who is responsible for it. It's just like a Bitcoin coloured coin, the Ripple network provides a reliable and impartial public record of who owns what, but you have to trust gateways to abide by their promises. If you are dealing with a legitimate gateway, then you could use the court system to try to recover your money if necessary. This is a complement to the trustless system used by Bitcoin and XRP, not a replacement for it.

You don't have to use XRP if you only want to use Ripple as a distributed BTC-fiat exchange, except for a very small minimum reserve requirement and tiny fees. And that's what got me interested in Ripple in the first place, a resilient distributed exchange for fiat and cryptocurrencies. That's what my signature refers to. Whether XRP succeeds as a currency or whether it is "fair" or not doesn't matter for that.

And as for fairness, I fail to see what is unfair about generating the XRP and the distributing them as they see fit. This is no different from store credit, gift vouchers etc.

How is the quantity of Ripples in circulation determined?

The proof for that destruction still somehow needs to reach Ripple but that's one possible way to do it, yes. It is actually quite hard to really "destroy" BTC in a sane way - spending as fee doesn't count, otherwise miners could spend their own coin as fees all day long. If you just send dust to the bitcoineater address, you'll spam the UTXO set with unprunable stuff.
Maybe by tracking coins you could do something like colored coins for every single satoshi, so over time people can spend them as fee and still redeem only the 2 100 000 000 000 000 units that exist in BTC land.

Any business that accepts BTC actually accepts Ripple already, since there is a bridge towards it, so using Ripple you can pay far more merchants than you might think. The nice thing is that you can do a "reverse BitPay" for example at the moment, by holding fiat and paying someone in BTC (maybe if you don't like the volatility or are bearish, yet still your favourite web shop only accepts BTC). Also you can hold e.g. LTC and stil pay anywhere BTC is accepted at current rates, even though something like "LitePay" doesn't (yet?) exist.

Depends of course on the exact attack - some transactions would easily be seen as fake, others might be more difficult.

Nope, you are assuming that the rules in Bitcoin-QT are actually enforced by some protocol - this is NOT the case. They are merely guidelines (that a lot of miners currently follow though).
Similar rules probably also could be laid out for Ripple if really needed, so far destroying XRP was enough though to keep spammers away.

If anyone REALLY wanted to harm Bitcoin and got their hands on a million or 100k of them, they should better simply buy mining equipment for that money, it is MUCH cheaper to attack using minig power than using transactions.

If for whatever reason they don't want to use the Bitcoin block chain for that transaction, they need to use 1/100 000th of 1 XRP to pay for the transaction fees on Ripple. Otherwise people would simply spam the ledger for fun.

These fees cannot be taken out of IOUs, because these are by definition not even existing as assets on the network, they exist only at the gateways. The only native asset to Ripple are XRP.

It might be possible to build a connection to BTC (it would need to be direct by the way, so you'd need to run a trustworthy Bitcoin client and a rippled) and to have some kind of proof that you paid some amount of BTC instead of destroying XRP to ensure non-spammyness.

Ripple's real use case is by the way not 2 people anyways using BTC - the really nice thing is that you can use whatever currency you want (e.g. BTC) while your counter party can receive whatever they want (e.g. USD). Ripple is much closer to BitPay than to Bitcoin.

Edit:
Depends on the form of DoS, if they spam meaningless transactions they could keep it up a quite long time I guess, though it wouldn't be too hard to just ignore that or simply dealing with it. They can spam the AccountState (similar to Bitcoin's UTXO set) but thanks to funding limits (which would be simply manually increased by independent rippled validator operators) this has a finite size. If they DoS attacked all known rippled servers out there, they might drive them to connect through VPNs and TOR, just like with bitcoin.

If the US government seized all BTC from Mr. Silkroad and mounted a DOS attack on the Bitcoin network, how long could they keep it up?

No, I mean the wallet in the sense of what for example your bitcoin wallet is: A client that is able to sign transactions using one or several private keys that have access to funds.

I think you talked mainly about b) (the money that gets locked away in the vaults of a gateway) while mmeijeri talked about a) (the wallet software where you see all the balances you have with one or several gateways + your XRP balance).

OK, I see what you mean. In the case BTC IOUs, yes they do hold your BTC for you, which means they do host a BTC wallet, or maybe outsource that to others. I thought you meant a Ripple wallet. You can store your Ripple wallet (which may or may not contain BTC-denominated IOUs) locally, you don't have to use a hosted service. Except for XRP, it means you're trusting the gateway to hold the fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies other than XRP for you. In the case of fiat currencies that could involve keeping physical money in physical vaults, but it more likely means keeping it in a bank account. For cryptocurrencies it means hosting wallets, though not necessarily a separate wallet for each customer.

I dont know. I meant Ripple protocol.

Well, then go grab some of these "thousands"? Bitstamp even operates a bridge towards BTC, so you can cash them out immediately (well in 5 seconds on average...) to BTC if you like.

Are there really people that are surprised that a random unbacked commodity can have significant value quickly in this forum?!

Currently ~250 are 0.01 BTC: http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/rippleXRP.html
They actually were worth a lot more in summer and tanked quite a bit after that.

Edit:
Yes, XPM is Primecoin, I guess nahtnam wanted to say XRP but had another currency code in his muscle memory...

Edit2:
You seem to combine 2 things:
a) the Ripple wallet (which is a client written in JavaScript, similar to the one offered by blockchain.info)
b) actual assets that get deposited at gateways (USD, BTC, gold bars, silver dimes, hours of work...)

a) is the stuff you access when going on ripple.com/client
b) can be stored online (depends on the asset), or (more likely) offline.

The Ripple network itself is distributed, anyone can run a node. The gateways (meaning the entities that actually store someone's "stuff") are more along the definition of decentralized (which is NOT what's depicted on ripplescam.org by the way!), similar to the bitcoin network and it's exchanges as "hubs". This is on a different layer of the network though, not at the protocol, but more at the actual usage part.

Nothing wrong with that, right? No one is forcing you to use it. If you have a financial interest in seeing BTC win, then that's just as legitimate and you are free to boycot it or to try to come up with a superior BTC-based solution. I'm agnostic about this, the more solutions the better, and market forces will sort out which ones will survive. I don't care which one wins, and it's even possible several ones wil coexist. In the short run I expect Ripple and Bitcoin to be enormously synergistic, and to me that's the most important thing, since that will make it likely P2P cryptocurrencies will take over the world. Which one ends up winning isn't that important.

200 ripple is 0.01? They give away thousands!

I'm willing to sell you small amounts of XRP at market rates for BTC if you need some to start (up to about 200, which is about 0.01 BTC currently), other than that you can buy them at Kraken, Bitstamp and some slightly more shady places. Also there are some people just giving them away if you promise to buy a few more and give these away to other newbies in return (I don't know how successful this stuff really is in the end, that's why I usually just sell them).

I don't like the currency much either, unlike bitcoins though XRP are just a small part of the system and can be mostly ignored if you don't explicitly want to use them to make markets.

You could do something similar with Bitcoin. It would be slower, but that needn't be a big problem.

If you want to understand Ripple, you have to make sure you understand the difference between the roles of validators, wallets and gateways.

Validators make decisions on which transactions make it into the ledger, much like Bitcoin miners, though there's no equivalent of a block reward. And like bitcoin miners, they don't get to decide the rules that determine which transactions are valid. Unlike bitcoin miners, they do have a vote on some things like fees and minimum reserve requirements.

Wallets are just like bitcoin wallets, they are just collections of private keys and maybe some extra information like labels for otherwise pseudonymous addresses of others. You can host them yourself, or use a hosted wallet service. You do not need to hold any IOUs issued by gateways to use a wallet, though that will limit you to using XRP and any fiat trade credit provided by your extended social network.

Gateways hold fiat currencies and issue and redeem IOUs for them. They need not hold wallets or run validators, though most gateways probably choose to do that as well. They do not keep the books, they merely allow fiat currencies to be traded on the Ripple ledger by honouring their IOUs. This is very similar to the idea of using coloured coins with Bitcoin. The blockchain can be trusted to keep accurate records, but you have to trust the issuers of coloured coins to redeem them for the real world assets they represent.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with Ripple.com. Its a fully featured system, but XPM itself is just another alt-coin.

That's exactly what runs at https://ripple.com/client/ yes.

The server component it connects to (see https://ripple.com/client/#/options) is the server called "rippled" from https://github.com/ripple/rippled. If you want to modify it so it uses BTC instead of XRP as native asset (I'd recommend adding BTC as alternative instead of replacing XRP, but that's up to you) you need to work on that first, not the client which is more or less a dumb frontend for an untrusted API provider.

Just like with Bitcoin alt-coins just please think of an original name for your project and use that throughout your fork, similar to every coin that is not on the Satoshi block chain should not call itself "Bitcoin", any distributed marketplace that does not run on the OpenCoin/RippleLabs ledger chain should not call itself "Ripple".

It would be really cool to see some forks in the wild by the way, if you need any help I'd recommend jumping over to the ripple.com forums though, the churn rate in this forum section (+ the amount of "DOGECOIN IS TEH AWSUM! WOW ! SO COIN!" posts) is a littel bit too high for more technical discussions.