Topic: Ripples a threat to bitcoin? - page 4. (Read 12820 times)

Saying opencoin has more VC than all the other bitcoin related ventures combined is simply not true. Why would you state this? Bitcoin related projects have accrued much more VC capital in total and on top of that a substantially greater amount of bitcoin related VC has been set aside for future investment.

What agenda do you have, exactly?

@afbitcoins

venture capitalists http://www.crunchbase.com/company/opencoin

Holy smoke! If I had 900 Bitcoins I would not be holding that in an exchange. I accept your point about exchanges, I hold all my bitcoins in my own wallet. Those are not IOU's

On another thread someone said the ripple ledger is completely transparent. Is that true ? Might revise my opinion a bit if thats the case, and if its built in that it has to be the case.
However my main doubts are how can you trust a centralised network?  What if the authorities close it down and you lose all your funds? What if Opencoin decides to start inflating XRP? you only have their word that they won't create more. With bitcoin I don't have such doubts.

Also nobody ever answers the question of who funds OpenCoin ?? Are banks behind it? Its a simple question.

MTGox =/= BTC

Bitcoin exchanges already are central points of failure! And MtGox's bank has limited them to ten(!!) SWIFT transfers per day. The exchange situation is a clusterfuck - that's why we see the ridiculous spread between mtgox price and bitstamp price.

How are the MtGox IOUs enforced? MtGox maintains utter and complete control over its IOUs - remember when they used to allow MtGox USD codes? They removed them. A ripple gateway would never be able to control its IOUs like that - a gateway's IOUs trade freely on the ripple order books.




LocalBitcoins - and now we are back to the SneakerNet - a time before the internet!! And then you get the LocalBitcoins exchangers who want to sell them at the MtGox price. No, there is a better way which takes advantage of the internet and technology utilizing next-gen cryptocurrency for decentralized exchange: Ripple.

An earlier commenter said you could equate ripple versus bitcoin as being like the dollar versus gold. This is a good comparison I think. The battle today between dollar and gold is a battle between unlimited debt and assets with hard limits, just as ripple is unlimited debt versus assets like bitcoin.


If a group of bankers gathered together to concieve a system to demasculate and control crytpo currency like bitcoin and litecoin, ripple is what they would come up with !   

Who is funding OpenCoin anyway ?

Centralized bitcoin exchanges are not the only way in and out !!! you can do private exchanges just as easily, just like cash. LocalBitcoins is a similar method for facilitating private exchanges.

Bitcoin - no inflation, no central point of control, no chargebacks, enables confirmed transactions with no trust.

Ripple - central points of failure, more ripples and xrp could be issued by central issuer, relies on trust and debt in gateways and those issuing the IOUs.

How will the ripple IOUs be enforced?

If governments don't like unlicensed money transfer I'm sure they'll love unlicensed and unregulated issuers of debt when they start turning up with their 7 foot mates to encourage non payers to cough up, especially if the id of the debt issuers is forged, spoofed etc.

To issue debt you need to be completely traceable and your identity known, as well as the identity of the person taking the debt, or else the system is useless.

When you say, "it will drop Bitcoin...", who is it?   No matter what the answer, you're speaking from a place of ignorance.  You can't "drop" any currency because no currency exists within Ripple, except XRP.  The PEOPLE will choose what currencies they want to deal in, not the network.  To the network, all currencies are the same.  They have zero value.

News flash, you're already at square one with Bitcoin.  Bitcoin has received and continues to receive more press and publicity than anything in the crypto space and more than most startup businesses could ever dream of.  Yet, mass adoption = not imminent.  Why?  Because as I've said all along, Bitcoin has a PR problem of an illegal and radical nature.  Not to mention, Bitcoin is further shunned because implementation offers no benefits to consumers over fiat debit cards.  And that's simply because the Bitcoin payment network sucks.  Bitcoin needs the Ripple payment network.  

In Ripple, the people will decide what they prefer.  If you believe in Bitcoin, you should welcome the challenge of putting your "currency" side by side with the rest of the digital and fiat world's currencies and letting it survive or die on its own merits.  If you're insecure about the future of Bitcoin, I can see how labeling everything else a threat would be a natural reaction.

With bitcoin, we have "fair" coin distribution controlled by an algorithm (distributed in proportion to hash power). But to determine the market price, we are at the mercy of exchanges. And clearly the current system of exchanges (networked by bank transfers) is failing at this task.

Well, the transparency and decentralization that we love about bitcoin (everyone knows how many bitcoins there are, and no central authority can seize anyone's bitcoins), ripple brings to exchange: everyone knows how many IOUs there are (bitstamp gateway cap currently stands at $259,210 USD and 2,321 BTC), and exchanges are not capable of seizing a user's IOUs. Instead, IOUs are traded freely on the ripple network, just as bitcoins are sent freely (as in speech) within the bitcoin network.

So there is a trade-off: free/fair coin distribution but centralized/balkanized exchange, or unfair/corporate coin distribution but free/decentralized exchange. Maybe there is a better, fairer way to do decentralized exchange, but I haven't seen one that actually exists (not to say there aren't plenty of proposals. but something that actually exists is always better than something described in a proposal). And since this is the real-world, there are always going to be trade-offs. But a real-world with Ripple is MUCH, MUCH better than real-world without it (even if it does have countless utopian proposals).

Now that fair distribution of bitcoin is reason alone why it would never be completely dropped in favor of XRP. Bitcoin's distribution algorithm could be the rock which provides stability against the whims of OpenCoin market operations. It's been said elsewhere: ripple is the dollar for the gold. Sometimes people like dollars and sometimes people like gold. But to say that ripple is an enemy is very short-sighted. At the very least, its a frenemy. Strategically, it is clear to me what ripple is: an enemy of my enemy, is my friend.

I made it clear I was talking about Ripples/XRP. Seeing as those are a necessity in order to use Ripple, you can't have on without the other. The network is playing all friendly with Bitcoiners, then once it's big enough, it will drop Bitcoin and say lets just use XRP instead because, as the dev admitted, it's better than Bitcoin within the ripple network. And then we're back to square one with a currency controlled by one group.

A lot will have to go right for Ripple in order for this scenario to come to fruition, but it's undoubtedly what the devs daydream about.

You're confusing XRP with Ripple the payment network.  

Now ask yourself, does that really sound complimentary, or threatening?

Good job ignoring context.

XRP is also stored offline, the "secret key" you get when you create a ripple wallet is analogous to the private keys you can export on blockchain.info (on ripple.com/client, an encrypted blob is stored on payward.com and decrypted with your wallet name and password so the web-client can sign transactions with your secret key).

Now, even though you can take responsibility of your own private keys, your net worth is directly affected by problems at the major bitcoin exchanges. Especially when only one or two big exchanges maintain a monopoly (eg if trading lag at MtGox crashes your net worth). Centralized/"balkanized" bitcoin exchanges with wire transfers as the only way in and out are clearly a problem. Ripple is a solution for that (not saying that it's a perfect solution, but something that exists is better than something described in a proposal).

I understand all that.  Which is why most of my net worth is stored in offline bitcoin wallets.  I prefer to take responsibility for my own money.

Redeem them with the issuer of course.  

how do i cashout these dollars?

Maybe they will compete down the road.  That really depends on Bitcoin's ability to remain innovative, if it plans to stay relevant.  This has nothing to do with Ripple and everything to do with Bitcoin devs.  Unless the plan is to hide the weaknesses and flaws of Bitcoin and just seek to destroy everything thing else rising within the crypto space.  Good luck with that.  Doesn't seem to be working too well but, I suppose there is always hope.  I'm also sure Ripple was around long before I came on the scene.  My crypto born on date, is May 3rd, 2013 when I bought my first couple Bitcoins via Bitinstant -> ZipZap.  It was about a month after that I started to get into Ripple, so hate me if you want but at least get your facts straight.  

Se my take on ripple (which I don't understand fully, I admit):
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3226115