Topic: Ripple vs Bitcoin - page 9. (Read 13380 times)

I actually had an idea for something that I would have called "cripple"...
Idea is on the backburner for now though.

Something that I'd love to see though would be to integrate BTC as second native currency into rippled (yes, this means validators need to track the bitcoin blocks too - compared to what rippled uses ressource wise not much of a deal really...) to be used as alternative to XRP when paying for transactions etc.

You can trace them back to ledger 32570 at the moment, in the future maybe to 0 too. The link between 0 and 32569 is lost atm. though, so 32570 is the earliest one we have and to which one can trace everything back. You need to verify balances in ledger 32570 (they look reasonable and add up to less than 100 billion XRP, as advertised) and transactions since then to verify everything available in Ripple. If you only care about more recent events, you can also define ledger 5.9 million as genesis for yourself, verify this one as being correctly assembled + hashed and only look at transactions since then.

See you're saying two different things. You say what happens before a point in time is irrelevant, yet all balances are known and can be traced back cryptographically; but they can't be traced back to ledger 0, obviously. Classic definition of trying to have a cake and eat it too.

[ANN] Cripple Payments
Cripple = Cryptographic ripple
Have you had your first cripple? 

....sorry....probably not funny.

Because I don't know what ledgers 0-32569 contain. If you run rippled from back then (or also a current version), you'd start with just the single root account and 100 billion XRP in it. As I was asked about theoretical possibilities, theoretically anything could have happened in there. It is very improbable but not impossible.

32570 is called "genesis" ledger (https://ripple.com/wiki/Genesis_ledger) because it is the oldest available ledger on the network atm. It is not the first ledger though. Ledger 0 is the one with (very, very, very likely) 100 billion XRP, 32570 misses already a few fractions of an XRP from transactions that took place in the meantime. As I said, there is a chance that older ledgers could be reconstructed. There is no way to go "below" ledger 0 though, so that is the definitive starting point.

Rippled actually usually just loads the most current verified ledger (~82 MB or so atm.) and uses this as "genesis" (all balances etc. are known after all and can be traced back cryptographically), you can instruct it to fetch more history if you want to. Bitcoin on the other hand always starts with block 0 as genesis and starting block and replays all transactions since then, because you can not know if a transaction is valid just by looking at the latest block in the block chain.

Then for what reason would you say:


And why not call the current ledger 0, the Genesis ledger? My last question.

How so, for someone starting with cash/fiat in a bank?

That's a definite no and that's what I tried to explain before with "it does not matter what happened before a certain point of time".

Will any balances before ledger 32570 ever affect what happens in the Ripple system in the future, yes or no? It's a yes or no question, Sukrim.

If you answer no then we can end the discussion, because it means all the info people would ever need is theoretically provided in ledger 32570 -- in which case there is no need to number it '32570'. Simply number it 0.

If you answer yes then we can still end the discussion, because everything I said prior about not being able to verify how many ripple units will ever impact the system applies.

only purpose of ripple: make it easier to buy BTC without BTC-fiat exchanges hehehehe 

Wrong, here's the code (again!): https://github.com/ripple/rippled

Wrong again, every node constantly audits transactions. It is easily auditable and verifiable.

In Bitcoin terms the ledger is something close to a UTXO set in a deterministic data structure, so to run a full node you only need this data (just like in Bitcoin) and history is kinda optional. Something similar to this approach has been suggested some time ago for Bitcoin too, here's the thread about it: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ultimate-blockchain-compression-w-trust-free-lite-nodes-88208

So far so good...

I think here is the issue that I probably did not explain too good:
You actually do know everyone's individual balance at ledger 32570!

It is not even that large, here it is in JSON format (every entry on a seperate line for better readability):
http://pastebin.com/P24vC3Vf

Every transaction since then is known and the result of applying them can be calculated and verified independently.

It would be perfect for that because of its support for rippling fiat payments through the trust graph. On the other hand the trust graph also makes it easier to break anonymity. So if Ripple is wildly successful in China, it could help the Chinese government to go after individual users.

Which is why every government on earth is corrupt, out of control, and sold your futures to the banking cartel, why you're taxed into bankruptcy, why communism exists in 2014, why bank bailouts destroyed the economies worldwide, why religious superstition and retardation is allowed to reign king over science and education, and why innocent people are plowed over for the wealth of a greedy few.

But hey, enjoy your pizza!

I hope that Ripple can become the big actor in china when those centralized exchanges were shutdown by governments, but I'm afraid that their gateway will also be shutdown following such kind of ban, it seems localbitcoins has better future

How in the world do you figure that?

Actually anything dealing with money involves transactions and balances. That's how any money system works.

You, Sukrim, have a dollar balance. You have a Ripple balance. You have a yen balance, and you have a bitcoin balance. You have balances for other things too which you may not have ever heard of. Now many of your balances may be zero (e.g. your yen balance etc.) but you have a balance, which is the sum of all the units of that currency you have in your possession. Whenever you make a tranasaction, i.e. trade with someone your balance changes.

Now you're trying to say dealing with Ripple balances means it doesn't matter what happened in the system before a point of time? Then how do you know anyone's balance?!? The whole point of any money system is accounting for peoples' balances. People want to increase their balance so they can buy more expensive things (make larger trades).

So within Ripple there must be a way to know all balances (this exists with Bitcoin). Otherwise the system does not allow anyone to mathematically check how many units the system has. As pointed out earlier, that's more akin to central bank fiat. So stop trying to confuse people by pretending there is some meaningful check which can be performed to verify how many ripple units exist in Ripple's system.

The ledger chain as you call it is not mined. It is arbitrarily assembled by an algorithm subject to the whims and fancy of Coinlabs, Inc. and/or Ripple Labs. It is not an open source project and it is not even publicly auditable. Again, this centralized ledger is akin to Liberty Reserve which was shut down and the operators were arrested and indicted. It just sounds too risky to get involved with.

What exactly did you see that made you come to this conclusion?

Well, just like with Bitcoin where you kinda need to use the Satoshi generated block chain, you kinda need to use the ledger chain RippleLabs started. You are free to run your own fork of course, but this has similar consequences as with Bitcoin (you'd create an Altcoin with Bitcoin rules or an alt-ledger with Ripple rules). Their validators are widely used, but not the only ones out there, so while they are currently still quite central to the network the network could very well survive without them. You can run your own validator by the way too, some people who are critical of RippleLabs would probably add yours to their UNL to have even more diversity. I might announce my own one "soonish" too, once it has a bit better hardware and runs more stable.

I already told you how to get the total number of XRP at any ledger since 32570, here you go again:
You can increment ledger_index and you'll see that these header form a hashed chain (see the value in parent_hash). If you want to see total balances of all accounts so you can make sure that they add up to the number in the header this is also possible.

I'm not sure how else to explain it, but if you deal with balances it does not matter what happened before a certain point of time, it matters what the state was at a certain point and what happened since then. Any ordinary(?) person with some knwoledge about accounting can tell you that and any ordinary(?) person that is a bit interested in programming and crypto can tell you that this is also verifiable on the ledger chain.

The bottom line is it's not possible to verify the number of Ripple currency units in existence, in contrast to Bitcoin. You've already expressed as much:


I don't care if the system is based on balances, transactions, or lunar eclipse events. If ordinary people can't mathematically verify for themselves the number of units in existence they should be wary of investing anything into it.

I meant Ripple Labs generated blockchain, although there isn't a way to validate that independently. As a black box, the Ripple Labs servers just seem to be a clearinghouse of transactions similar to Liberty Reserve.

Look, you are suggesting that instead of a software bug the first 10 days of Ripple transactions hide something that is not intended in the system, would shatter any kind of trust in RippleLabs as the developers and which would have 0 influence on Ripple whatsoever afterwards. It makes for nice theoretical discussions, the practical implications are however 0.

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The volumes for XRP on coinmarketcap are underreported (they only represent BTC.Bitstamp/XRP afaik.) though compared to other coins they are still low. A good realistic ballpark figure is ~250k USD. I don't know how to fix them "properly" though or how to give a "real" volume, since trading volume is so easy to fake (see Huobi et.al.) and trading on Ripple is so cheap that it would be trivial to fake any kind of volume. I guess it's better to let people do their own research or assume there is not much going on rather than dealing with volume spikes of a few million BTC every now and then once someone decides to have some "fun".

rippled is not a webserver, you would probably deploy ripple-client on a local webserver though. Then tell the client to connect to your local server instead of the official public servers and your local rippled server needs connectivity to other rippled servers of course (just like bitcoind). I am not sure what you mean by "Ripple Labs hosted transactions".

In Bitcoin yes (since it is based on previous outputs of transactions), in Ripple (which is based on balances) this is not true.

The thing about 21 millions was an example that some statements are often simplified ("there will only be 21 million Bitcoins" instead of "there will be at least 12.61 million Bitcoins and up to 20.999... million Bitcoins depending on miners acting economically rational or not") and as you see in this thread it is hard to find a balance.