Topic: Ripple: The currency of your enslavement! (Read 4750 times)

If you think Bitcoin will take over the world on its own and become a one world currency then maybe you should hate on Ripple. But if you believe this you're in a dream world. The real world will be subject to fiat currencies for many years to come.
 
This world is still all about paypal and western union with their ridiculous fees and hidden charges and silly conversion rates, and a banking system that perpetually funnels wealth upwards to central authorities. Ripple is the opposite of this for two (maybe 3) reasons:

1 - all the fees and crapiness of current system go bye bye
2-  100B XRP is a fixed limit. There can never be any inflation, or any confusion about this. It's in the source.
(3? - The credit system is replaced with something way more organic based on the real needs of people in real communities, and not the balance sheets of pointless banks)

Well you shouldn't put blind trust even in a well established system where the source has been available for decades either.

We'll just have to wait for the source for the servers to become available first.

If you know of someone reputable who has the skills, time, and desire to do a review, please let the OpenCoin team know.

Haven't looked too much into it - but let the market decide. If this is something the market do not want to have, then it will not succeed, and for those who don't like it, they can use something else.

The point is, Stardust is absolutely right.

von Braun was as nazi-scientist as they get and he pretty much pushed the whole US space program to success by himself:)

 just another reason this forum kicks ass 

Wow, only on bitcointalk can a conversation quickly turn from alternative crypto-currencies to nazi scientists.  

Trust didn't take astronauts to the moon, it was nazi scientists and scientific skepticism.  Air travel, highways, and food, are more safe when you double check.

I agree that humans are social animals, but I wouldn't want us to behave like chimps/wolves (chimps have gangs that kill, wolves only the alpha male/female can reproduce, and are generally fascistic).  Usually trust in leaders brings on atrocities.  Humans can be social without trust and leaders.
Except for BDSM (which I'm not into), I don't see where else trust would be required.

Trust is also what made people loose money with pirateat40, GLBSE, and with many other scammers or well intended people.  If people would have demanded more transparency, they wouldn't have been victims.

They wouldn't be scarce before Ripple actually takes off in a big way and gets used for IOU transactions, since the XRP in the wild right now can pay for millions of transactions, but you're right that the original holders of XRPs have big sway over the price.

This means XRP are scarce, which means they have a market value. Moreover, OC retains giant sway over that value.

At this moment of time, I think the XRPs are plentiful. I haven't heard about anybody actually buying anything of value using Ripple yet (other than currency), which is less than can be said for Bitcoins, so that suggests to me that there's still plenty of XRP to go around.

In the longer term, the ideal would be to hand them out and/or sell them based on how much actual economic activity takes place, and what it costs to process transactions. So XRPs would be neither scarce enough to make transactions prohibitively expensive, nor so cheap that people would make thousands of fake transactions to slow down the network or create fake trust in their own IOUs. To compare it with stamps, not so few of them that post offices would be sold out, and not so easy to obtain that you could send rocks and gold bricks in the mail for free.

Edit: This is a hilarious piece of history I didn't know: In the early days of parcel post service in Utah, the bricks for a whole building were sent through the Post Office. They call the building the "Parcel Post Bank" and it still stands today: http://history.utah.gov/apps/markers/detailed_results.php?markerid=1525

while I agree with you on some of your points, I really have issue with what you said about trust.

without trust, astronauts couldn't reach the moon, air travel would never be possible, no one would drive on the highway, I'll not eat food bought from grocery stores -- the whole modern society is based on trust.

Let's face it, humans are social animals, social animals, be it a troop of monkeys or a pack of wolves, they rely on trust to survive.

Of course blind trust can be abused and lead to all sort of issues, but blaming the evil of enslavement on trust doesn't make sense, it's greed, hunger for power.

Once and for all: at any given time XRP are either easy to obtain in large quantities or hard to obtain in large quantities (i.e., scarce). Can the OCRipple proponents choose one option and stick to it?

True, plus you never need be in debt if you use Ripple, just buy all your IOU's from trusted gateways like BITSTAMP to make payments.

+ 1

If you are afraid of OpenCoin actions, just don't use them (XRP) as asset.
Use them just as their primary function, they are against spam.
You need few XRP to use all the exchange functions of the Ripple network.

Hope I'll make you a little bit more happy by telling you I'm not hopping onto this.

For more:

OpenCoin Inc Will Debase Ripples For Wealth Transfer To Themselves
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1571260

Ripple Scam: Centralized, Centrally Issued, Bribes exchanges, Closed Source
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ripple-scam-centralized-centrally-issued-bribes-exchanges-closed-source-tax-147789

Ripple: A revolution, or a pre-mined currency scam? ANALYSIS (spoiler: spam)
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ripple-a-pre-mine-does-it-matter-146964

While Bitcoin was created to free you, give you financial independence.  Transparent and verifiable from the beginning with a fair way of distribution (mining).  Ripple was created to enslave you more than banks ever did.  Closed source and opaque, with a distribution of XRPs method, designed to send a clear message.

While Bitcoin promotes mistrust and decentralization, true to the hacker ethic (Hacker ethic).  Ripple is a currency based on debt that promotes trust.  One of the origins of slavery in human history is debt and trust.  Debt also takes away your dignity, while you owe someone something you are not free.  Unless you are a scammer and don't acknowledge the debt (but even that doesn't keep you free if the debt is enforced).  By trusting someone you are always placing yourself beneath them.  Someone who has honest intentions doesn't require trust.

Ripple is also hierarchical.  Notice the 20:80 divide, an inside joke reference to the 1%:99%, but also to send the message that XRPs are valuable, and who holds them.  To get some XRPs you have to beg for them, the purpose why they choose this method of distribution is to satisfy their ego.  To tell you who is the master, and for them you are just a beggar.  Joel Katz's weaseling around questions and his claims of being prohibited to speak of certain things; His way of telling you that he is part of the elite and you are not.  Notice how also you don't have control over private keys like in Bitcoin.  Even if they make it open source eventually, it doesn't matter, because it will be too late by then.

Well I might have stretched it a little bit.  But misterbigg, gmaxwell, casascius, and others are correct in their criticism.

If the creators of this Ripple were serious about, they wouldn't have created this pump'n'dump crap.  They would have made it open source from the beginning, and not a bitcoin clone (and a bad one at that), that functions as another pump'n'dump scheme.  It's disappointing to see how many intelligent people fell for it.