Topic: Theymos: What the fuck is up with BFL and TradeFortress? - page 3. (Read 14360 times)

Actually that's evidence that you're not using your media efficiently.  600 is a little extreme, but 150 is really low ball these days.  You can be  interacting with people in some way shape or form 24/7 and can know more about the people around you than your ancestors would have thought possible.  Trust has always been a hard nut to crack, but I think that Dunbar's Limit can actually be computed in terms of ripple connections you can honestly maintain in the interests of both parties.  Once Ripple (and other technology) enters into the equation, you can coordinate with much larger groups than had been up until that point reasonable (however still finite).

More evidence that social media has corrupted the word "friend" until it is almost meaningless. Someone might have 600 acquaintances, but friends?, no. Trusted friends, much less.

Robin Dunbar's wrote the first paper on social group maximums without a hierarchial/authoritiarian structure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

TL;DR
150 friends is the most anyone can reasonably have, and that is exceptional.

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Suppose the Gateway has a physical location, somewhere that they rent, such as the Toronto Startup space company that accepts bitcoin.

They might be interested in being able to pay rent with Ripple, however the Toronto Startup space does not trust them.  They would trust their rental space, and in the event that they managed to use that trust, they would pay a month's rent with it, putting the balance back at 0, perpetually.

In practice this just looks like the customers paying rent for the Gateway, and I've seen something very similar work.

Maybe, but maintaining the status on those cheques would be a management nightmare with 600 friends.  Ripple makes it easier.

(Also not everyone gets free chequing -- if you trust your friend for 2$ but your cheque costs 2$ to cash...doesn't help you two much)

Also there are things that Ripple can do that are not included with that scenario.

Consider a gateway whose primary purpose is to serve merchants. Merchants who accept their balances won't do any business unless their customers can get balances from them. The easiest way for them to get that going is to agree to accept balances from other more established gateways that have a working "cash in from the general public" infrastructure. If customers with balances at other gateways can't pay the merchants, the gateway fails. One way to ensure this is to provide backstop liquidity by trusting other gateways.

Obviously, this has risk associated with it. The gateway would have to carefully weigh the benefits and costs associated with doing this.

Unless arbitragers or market makers come in, a gateway aimed primarily at merchants will have a huge cash imbalance as they pay out to merchants but don't get any cash coming in. Unless they accept balances from other gateways, this imbalance will destroy their business as their customers' customers can't acquire balances to make payments to the gateway's customers.

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The problem is that this lets them borrow from you even when it's not convenient for you, it makes it hard to keep track of how much they've borrowed and when they've paid you back, and it makes it hard to set and manage a limit to how much they can borrow. Ripple can knock down a lot of these barriers. But whether that's enough to make social credit work, I don't know. Real social changes will be necessary -- people will have to be more open about their finances and more willing to accept help.

Musicgod,

You dont need ripple to help your friends like that. Just give them checks that they can withdraw from your account when they need (its exactly the same concept).

About trusting ( ) LOL!!! I mean granting trust in ripple network (giving ripple checks), not the feeling of trust!!!!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!

You are unjustly paranoid.  People and institutions have other people and institutions that they trust.  Even if most employees do not have access to the cold storage wallet SOMEONE does, and that person the exchange trusts.  The exchange trusts employees to not quit, to not steal from them, to not cause legal problems on their behalf, and so on.   There is no institution that is free from this necessary trust that binds society together.   You'd need a purely virtual exchange to do this and then you wouldn't be dealing with fiat currency at all.


Firstly, who are you to tell the world how to help their friends?  More options for friends to work their finances together isn't necessarily a bad thing.  So it's not your cup of tea, that's OK - you don't have to use it.  But it just works.

Secondly, you don't necessarily know when your friend is going to need it.  Suppose they don't need money 99.99% of the time, is it really worth the effort of their asking you to borrow it when they need it, rather than ahead of time when they don't?

Thridly, since you're effectively creating money when you create ripple connections, this is money that does not really exist in the economy, and as the money supply is increased, the amount of trade that can occur increases, further separating your group of friends, and the entities it is involved with from autarky.. If you only lend money to your friend when he needs it rather than making sure the ripple network routes it appropriately, money can sit more idle than it could given a Ripple network to route it.  It can allow him to be *more productive*, allowing your friend to be better off, which reduces the odds even further of him having to actually use it for something he needs.

I woudnt trust a gaeway that trusts someone else.
If your friend needs help, send him money.

Gateways have entities they can trust, such as employees, and true friends will trust eaxhother with trivial amounts ( which do add up in aggregate. )

No one forces you to trust anyone.  You are grossly mistaken

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1b9k4b/why_arent_we_using_ripple_as_an_exchange_instead/c953blo

In fairness to ripple, MP appears to not totally understand ripple.  He seems to be confusing XRP with IOUs/debt on occasion (in the IRC conversation) and also making the mistake many have made of believing if you trust someone and they then trust someone else that causes a problem.  It doesn't - at least not one related to ripple specifically, just the general risk that they lose money to someone else and can't pay their debt to you.  The big problem comes where you trust two different parties and that trust is then treated by ripple as being identical in value and fungible if it has the same denomination.

Specifically this is incorrect:

"Well… that’s not how Ripple works. As long as you trust both Lou Jiwei and some random Chinese dude any people who trust you can trade LJ’s yuans straight for the random dude’s."

The emboldened part should read "any people who trust LJ and hold random dude's yuan can exchange random dude's yuan for any of LJ's yuan that YOU hold".

They don't need to trust you at all - or even know you exist.  And if they do trust you it wouldn't make any difference - as it isn't YOUR (as in ones issued by you) yuan being traded.  They need to hold random dude's yuan (they can have zeroed trust to him) to send you and trust LJ sufficiently to accept whichever of his yuan you hold.  Then they can exchange the junk for good stuff with you - limited by the extent to which you trust random guy.

A lot of people arguing about this don't really understand this - so describe a problem which doesn't actually exist, giving ripple an easy way out (by letting them focus on addressing factually incorrect assertions about how ripple works whilst ignoring the real problem).

The general issues pointed out by MP at the start ARE real problems of course - particularly the whole system being based on a requirement that users willingly accept CP risk (I might not get my money back) and opportunity cost (my money isn't earning anything) without remuneration.  If the software is amended to fix the specific issue discussed in this thread (which effectively blind-sides people into providing general liquifity when they thought they were holding specific debt) then it's hard to see where liquidity will come from - as providing liquidity at significant risk but with no benefit isn't going to appeal to too many people (not ones who still have significant funds that is - the ones willing to do that should mostly have lost their money by now doing the same stupid thing before).

All of that said, if I can figure out some way to pay interest on Ripple I'd seriously considering offering bonds on it.  If there's people willing to provide liquidity for no cost then I'm guessing I wouldn't have to pay a very high rate - making it a cheaper way to fund-raise than I currently use.

Even IF you trust two parties the same amount you still should NOT allow their debts to be exchanged without your specific consent.  If you can't see why then you need to consider what the scenarios are where such exchanges would be requested - then realise that some of those scenarios have a cost/risk to you (specifically one where the party requesting the exchange has information you don't).  Which means you need to charge a premium for any exchange that you believe to be of equal value.  Apparently some sort of system to allow this does exist - but as it isn't open-source that can't be verified and it isn't available to the public anyway.  And I wouldn't be surprised if it was flawed (for example by insisting on using the same relative values for trades in both directions).

Both are actually possible inside Ripple ; )
(about the second, if i'm not wrong, the fee is collected in the currency you are trading)

This should teach us something about people who answered you before me?

So you are parroting everything MP tells you? Or did you look into ripple yourself and have a reason for you opinion?

Ahaha Joel CherryTruck Insanikatz strikes again.



Because they don't read Trilema. More importantly, because they can't afford actual consultants and don't have who to give them the quarter to buy a clue with.

Things for me are simple (maybe because my short vision).

Never trust another user in Ripple, even if he is you best friend.

Trust only in trustworthy gateways.

A gateway should trust nobody.

The trusts should be subdivided in:

1 - I trust you to issue IOUs to me (and not the opposite)
2 - I trust you to take my cash and get an IOU issued against you (and just that - if i am a gateway)

The problem with the trust the way it is now is that when you trust someone you are trusting he will not trust anyone that is untrustworthy, directly or indirectly. The untrustworthyness is not just bad faith, but stupidness too. Maybe the trusted person have good intentions but is a terrible administrator, etc.

TradeFortress is not a scammer, he issued his IOUs, thats ripple. IOUs have no maturity date.

Sorry to reach back to this old post, but no one answered it yet.

Sure, knowing that Bitcoin is not immune to abuse form amoral immoral hackers could be called a flaw in Bitcoin, just as the possibility of theft is a flaw in paper currency.  A flaw in the sense that its absence would make both products more desirable -- safer & less burdensome to use. 
What it comes down to is a matter of degree, a point where a shortcoming becomes a defining quality.  A point where, in Joe Stalin's words: "Quantity [becomes] a quality all of its own."