Topic: Ripple - the real Bitcoin competition? - page 3. (Read 28371 times)

Their clients would sue them and win.


If you're worried about that, then don't invest in XRP. You only need tiny amounts to be able to use the Ripple functionality for other currencies, including BTC. And of course, OpenCoin has no motive to do this, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did. They want the XRP exchange rate to go up, not down, just not uncontrollably.


The protocol is distributed, just like Bitcoin, so governments cannot really shut it down any more than they can shutdown Bitcoin or Bittorrent.


Only a problem until OpenCoin releases the source code. It is in their interest to do so, precisely because it will dispel fears like that.


Scare mongering.

When I researched Bitcoin i was amazed at how perfectly everything ties together; there are no loose ends, and any questions starting with "What if this happened..." are already thought of and answered within the protocol...

However when I look at Ripple there are so many things that could go wrong, that you just have to assume that it will go wrong at some point such as:

1) What if a huge gateway (such as Bitstamp) just decides "nah we're not going to do Ripple anymore"...and all their IOU are now worthless; it would bring the whole thing down, everyone would be trying to unload their worthless balances, it would be total melt down.  And the best part is Bitstamp could probably continue to operate as a regular exchange (what is Ripple going to do about it)

2) What if Opencoin starts leaking their billions of XRP onto the market to try to turn a profit?  As soon as people start to notice everyone will dump and run

3) What if Opencoin get shut down by the government?

4) What if Opencoin gets hacked and hackers use their Opencoin servers to do all kinds of bad stuff

5) What if Ripple itself gets hacked (source is still closed so no one knows how secure it is, there may be major security flaws)

6) What if Opencoin decides to randomly start doing bad shit like making more XRP, confiscating balances, banning accounts...etc..

These are just a few glaring "What if"s, I imagine people with more knowledge on the subject could come up with 20 more than this.

Basically Ripple makes Opencoin the de facto Fed...

It really is insanity that every Bitcointalk account created prior to February is now worth $300-$500...lols already got my $500 (in BTC)...I'm surprised the bitcointalk admins have not been tempted to start using old accounts to post their own Ripple address and cash in on this madness.

I wonder is gateways, such as Bitstamp, really considered what there were getting into; I mean if Ripple took off, in 5 years they could end up with outstanding IOUs of billions of dollars...are you telling me Bitstamp is prepared to hold billions of dollars in cash reserve to cover their IOUs...?  The last thing I'd want to be doing is running a gray market currency exchange (and yes I consider Bitcoin still a gray market; as laws/regs have yet to be applied) and have billions of dollars in the bank...(MASSIVE TARGET ON YOUR BACK!)?  Or they are planning to operate a factional reverse...god help us all...either way I wonder if they really thought through all the ramifications.

If Ripple takes off it will be a Bitcoin killer, not a metacurrency. There's absolutely no reason to prefer to use BTC instead of XRP aside from speculation. XRP is a better currency than BTC because they can control the price and make it stable, with a gentle upwards slope guaranteeing a nice return in relation to the risk, say 10-20% per year. For people wanting to use it as a currency, that's a major improvent over BTC.

They don't market themselves as Bitcoin killers because they want to leverage the bitcoin community for their own profit, but make no mistake about it, Ripple is not "a distributed bitcoin exchange". Think of XRP as an improved bitcoin where the early adopters are the developers, committed to build and extend the ecosystem instead of simply hoard BTCs and wait for others to do the work. It's improved in many ways: instant clearing, high scalability, no need for a mining race, built in distributed exchange and many other features in addition to fixing the "Bitcoin early adopter incentives" problem.

Most of the crap on that website is just FUD or false, with one large exception: Ripple is centralized in it's bootstrap phase and is vulnerable to regulatory pressure for the first few years.

Edit: On the open source front,  they have little incentive to release it now in alpha phase, when most innovation takes place, pantents are being filled etc. and they are at high risk from disruption by someone who copy pastes an "open ripple". Once they are established, I agree with their website they have a major incentive to release the source, as long as there's no longer any direct threat from copycats.

Social payment might be enough, with relatively small trust limits.

Hmm - indeed pretty bad - but some claims are not true (OpenCoin is not hiding that the 100 billion coins are premined), some are speculative - like the fact that Ripple will not be OpenSource when it is released. 

I would agree that it it not worth a look if it is not 100% Open Source, and OpenCoin made a big mistake to declare it Open Source when it is only planned to be Open Source - but if you say that it is scam because it is not Open Source and they release it as Open Source then your argument is invalidated and you are left with an angry page with no true arguments.

This.

http://ripplescam.org/

If they don't release the source then there is not much to discuss - nobody will use it.

If they don't release the source code of Ripple server, there is no guarantee that the network runs the way they told you, it could just be another centralized e-cash, opencoin can withdraw at anytime and the network will stop to function.

If they do release the source code, then the Ripple framework would be infinitely replicable, anyone can just go and create their own Ripple network and release their own XRP, this could potentially mean that XRP has no value at all because it doesn't require a backup by computational power.

Ripple does a number of very nice things for Bitcoin. My money says that if Ripple takes off, it gives Bitcoin a significant boost. Why? First, it can in principle make bitcoins easier to buy, and limit the number of points of failure of this infrastructure by acting as a distributed exchange. If the social lending catches on (unlikely in the near term, imho) then you don't even need to depend on gateways in order to buy bitcoins, it would just facilitate trades through peer networks.

More importantly, it hopes to be a currency-indifferent payment system. This means that anybody who accepts any kind of Ripple payment, also accepts Bitcoins. It also means that if you are selling a product, if you accept Bitcoin payments through Ripple, people can pay you in USD and it will be converted on the fly. Basically, it's a distributed, omnidirectional BitPay-like service.

There are more subtle reasons why Ripple would be a boon for Bitcoin: one is that the economics of providing liquidity means that the cost of Ripple payments between gateways in the same currency is related to the underlying costs of moving that currency around. This means that even on Ripple, payments in BTC will tend to be cheaper than payments in USD, so if people use Ripple, they may want to start using bitcoins. (Or they may want to start using XRP for the same reason.)

All of this is assuming that Ripple delivers: that OpenCoin delivers on its promise to open source rippled, and that the consensus mechanism turns out to be a good and scalable and secure way to operate something like Ripple, among others.

The role XRP play in this is uncertain – it does compete more or less directly with Bitcoin, but people may or may not end up using it as a currency if Ripple takes off. It has advantages and disadvantages over Bitcoin as a currency – faster confirmations and cheaper transactions, but (more) limited privacy and a troubling relationship with OpenCoin. Also, everybody who accepts XRP also accepts Bitcoin (as mentioned above), but the reverse is not true.

OCripple is not Ripple.

It's like a metacurrency really. Just one more layer of abstraction to Grok.

Ripple is designed to facilitate currency exchange, not product exchange, they aren't meant to be a currency.

I am intrigued by the clearing house idea.  Somehow it is not advertised or explained much on the Ripple.com site - but they claim to be an implementation of the original Ripple idea that was about a distributed clearing house.  I believe that having trust factored into the system as a variable that is directly manipulated by users might lead to a system more robust against bubbles.

LOL @ OP

Ripple = pile of dodo

Relevant to your thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/why-ripple-is-against-everything-bitcoin-201794

Altcoins are not real competition for bitcoin.  They don't provide any substantial advantage over bitcoin - it's all the same digital gold - but Ripple with the distributed clearing house idea is something quite a bit more complex and potentially enabling.  

On the other hand OpenCoin declares to discourage XRP speculating and they have all 100 billion XRPs already created - so it might not gain such notoriety as Bitcoin.