It's really exciting to see theory tested. I've stayed well clear of Ripple for this exact reason. As TradeFortress puts it; trust isn't binary.
This concept in Ripple is central to it's usefulness and it just doesn't hold water. These objections have been brought up since it's inception and it's only been met with constant hand-waving by the Ripple developers.
Even debt at Banks like Chase or Bank of America aren't interchangeable. The whole idea of Ripple is that if Chase promises to redeem 100$, then Bank of America will redeem 100$ and hold the IOU from Chase. That's completely outrageous.
Imagine that we somehow got to a point where Ripple was the dominant exchange platform in the world, and regularly handles transactions on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars. You mean to tell me that we're just suppose to trust notoriously untrustworthy banks to never have less than 100% reserves? That a gigantic bank is never going to default and renege on it's IOU's? If we trusted banks this much, then why did we ever bother with Bitcoin?
The constant inclination in the system would be to move debt of untrustworthy institutions, to trustworthy institutions. Putting the bad debt on the balance sheets of the good banks.
The developers of course continue creating their mountain of rule
s and caveat
s to inexorably chip away at the problem, but what they don't realize is that they're chipping away at their central premise; That of interchangeable debt. Once they totally abandon that idea, they'll have something that works, but when they get there, what will be the point?
A peer to peer trust-free medium of exchange?
(BTC)Edit:
ROFLMAOPIMP
Webr3
This is where this started??:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=210634.20Where you were WARNED REPEATEDLY in a thread totally about TradeFortress "scamming" people and then you lost 10btc anyway? He gets your bitcoins back to you, you are warned again, and you lose them in exactly the same way! Holy cow! LMAO!!!
TradeFortress should have kept your bitcoins, and you shouldn't parading around in your dumbassity* trying to attack TradeFortress' reputation.
Wow. I have to step back and cool off from this. This too hilarious/dumb/incredible.
*That's a word now.
Edit2:
"Okay, why should I remove the trust line? Have you extend trust to people who are untrustworthy?" -Webr3
Ahahahahahaha. Wow.
Edit3:
Ahem... Now that I've had a few deep breathes. Sorry for your loss, but it's a problem with Ripple, not TradeFortress.
Edit4: Realized they never really made any serious effort to address the problems.