Topic: Ripple: XRP Price Speculation (Read 4230 times)

+1

No, that's not right. If it was possible for the consensus process to alter account balances arbitrarily the system would never be accepted. One of the invariants of the Ripple system is that XRP cannot be created at all, and that the genesis ledger entry (first ledger entry) starts a certain account (to which the founders hold the private key) 100 billion XRP.


Also incorrect. XRPs must be scarce to deter transaction spam. This is directly from the developers of the system.


"Valuable enough" means "scarce enough to have value."


XRPs function ideally as currency, and one could argue they function as a reserve currency. In some ways they could be better than Bitcoins.


No, that's not what they are saying at all. OpenCoin's business plan is to "hold XRPs and hope they go up in value." This is a direct quote (see above).

You need to review the statements that have come from developers of the system again, I think that you are not looking at the big picture.

I think most of you are missing the point of Ripple and XRPs.

While currently opencoin has a bunch of XRPs to hand out, note that in the future a "consensus" process can issue more of them.  The goal is for them to NOT be scarce, though they are currently scarce since the distribution has just started and not too many people have gotten their 40000 of them yet.

Why would folks give XRPs away to keep them scarce?  The ripple community's goal (as envisioned by the creators) is not for XRP to be a scarce commodity, but merely for them to be valuable enough that it isn't easy to spam the whole network with new transactions or new accounts.

So don't expect XRP to skyrocket in value.  That's not what they are for.

What are they for?  Like the founders keep saying - they're like stamps to let you exchange other currencies.....

Ripple is about the exchange of other currencies, and ripples/XRP are about facilitating that, not about currency speculation in XRP itself.  As bitcoin itself has taught lots of people, and as Adam Smith said a long time ago, currency is about two things: “value in use” and “value in exchange”.  Folks are viewing bitcoin as valuable for both.  XRPs are designed for just "value in use".

Or at least that is the intent, as I read it.  Ultimately the consensus process (i.e. the community of users) will decide.

You are of course correct about this part, but to a new user's self interest it is a pointless distinction to make. The distribution of Bitcoin is indeed limitied to a subset of users, and my uncle wouldn't care that it was a random self-recruiting set of computer nerds who got in while mining was profitable or a predetermined set selected by the authors. The salient point is that it is a group of people to whom he owes nothing, and that owe him nothing in the future.

Ripple is not mined. You can't premine something that can't be mined. You could say that XRPs have been minted, or been printed at the stamp printing factory instead.

Yes it's seems to be the case. Looking at exchange rates on ripple the it took ~75,000 XRP to 1 BTC yesterday, it's down to ~45,000 XRP today. But you are right time will tell.

I have been wrong on this so far, XRPs have done well based on the bitstamp exchange rate.  Even with people advertising for old forum accounts to get the free ripples the price seems to be heading up in terms of BTC not down like I expected.  Congrats and well played to Opencoin -- so far.

Well, we're the new wealthy elite so we might as well define the terms.

lol, the next edition of Webster's Dictionary, right?

You're not using the right definition of premine:

"pre-mine" (n) - A condition of a cryptocurrency when part or all of the currency distribution is limited to a predetermined subset of the target audience, under control of the authors.

The "classic" definition of premine is when someone forks Bitcoin, makes a few tweaks, and starts mining on the new chain in secret before releasing the client to the public. The definition above still applies, because the author limits the distribution of the currency by withholding the client binaries or sources.

Ripple is a total premine because 100% of the currency went straight to the authors. No one had an opportunity to be on equal footing with respect to control over the Ripple money supply.

Bitcoin does not qualify as a premine because the currency distribution was not limited to a subset of users. The authors did not prevent anyone from mining. Just because someone arrived to Bitcoin after other miners started getting rewards doesn't mean it is a pre-mine to them. In order to qualify as a premine, the author of Bitcoin must have withheld the client in order to obtain substantial block rewards before releasing to the public. This did not happen; Bitcoin was released publicly and everyone had the opportunity to mine. The author(s) of Bitcoin did not limit the opportunity to claim block rewards only to select individuals.

They haven't finished giving away the free XRP yet. Also there's no pre-mine if there's no requirement for miners.

Realize that to every new user of a cryptocurrency, after the first guy, it appears to be a pre-mine. If my uncle or work colleague or whatever heard about Bitcoin and that you have to buy these from some people that ran their computers at high load to "mine" for "nonces", doing no work that will benefit my uncle in the future besides making the blockchain billions of times more secure than it needs to be, he'll consider Bitcoin itself to be a 100% pre-mine. Even so Bitcoin is not completely useless, because it can be used to handle transactions: You buy some Bitcoins, and then you spend them. You just can't mine them.

XRPs are just the newest fad of the week...

Ripples entrance to the ALT coin community is similar to NVC giving BTC-e 100,000 NVC to get them to put NVC on their exchange. Ripple gave away 50 BILLION XRPs to end users to get them to start using Ripple. Seems a little fishy to me.

They pre-mined 100 billion XRPs, I can't believe anyone actually thinks they will be that valuable. Even though they are giving 50 billion away, it is still a pre-mine, it's just the coins are in more people's hands than a normal pre-mine.

ok

This thread has shown that 74% of voters believe Bitcoin to be the better investment as of today. Therefore your statement is false.

What has no purpose is your statement that "this thread has no purpose."

Yes. I'm just saying this thread has no purpose.

Haha:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme
Let the games begin, I guess. Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode with the bottle recycling.
[SPOILER]
They end up using a mail truck to transport the bottles.
[/SPOILER]

How would they pump the crowd/price if they did that, Sherlock?

XRP price is controlled by supply from Opencoin. Why not ask them about it instead of speculating..?

That's an interesting idea. Norway sells perpetual non-denomiated 1st class international mail stamps, quite similar to XRP except that their number is not limited and the weight classes are set by law. These stamps only have to be honored by the Nowegian Postal Service, and have no expiry date. Unspent stamps thus represent an eternal liability for the national postal service, except if some law is passed that makes them invalid in the future. If some day a large holder desides to ruin Christmas by using his hoard of stamps (bought decades ago) to send lumps of coal to every child in the world, they would have to change the postage weight rates (or make the sending of lumps of coal illegal). Since Ripple would only be able to do the first thing (increasing cost) this would make mailing super expensive while the evil santa is sending out coal, but the postal service would still make money. If the postal service could neither ban lumps of coal from being sent, nor change the weight limits, they would either go bankrupt or have to ask the government to help them with a draft or other way to temporarily expand the service volume.

Your proposal, with an expiry date, would look more like an International Reply Coupon. These are redeemable worldwide, for a 1st class international mail stamped letter in the country where it's redeemed, but each coupon has an expiry date stamped on it. I have a couple of those, and I have to send them out soon to allow my correspondent abroad to redeem it and send his reply back to me.

IRCs having an expiry date helps limit the potential liability of the postal services worldwide. If there was no expiry date, they would not be able know if millions of dollars worth of IRCs had been lost, or if that they suddenly would be spent some time in the future.

RFC for a sketch of proposal to eliminate Flood Risk while not depriving founders of just rewards and not slowing down network growth due to account funding becoming too expensive:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.1574081

If satoshi came out with a new bitcoin it would gain some traction based on who he is. I dont think ripple would have the value it does without the founders who are behind it.

In the same way Google coins would have some value because its google backing them. Its the same reason ixcoin is worthless because no one trusts the founder.