Could someone write or draw a complete explanation how the currency exchange feature works. Lets say Alice is newcomer to ripple but she has yen bills in her pocket and wants to buy a computer from a webshop that wants to see no other currency than USD but has previously done business with a ripple gateway.
Alice deposits the Yen bills at a gateway and the gateway issues here a Yen balance in the Ripple system. The webshop selects a USD gateway and configures its Ripple account to accept USD at that gateway. When Alice goes to buy, the Ripple network does pathfinding and matchmaking to find a way to exchange her Yen balance at her gateway for a USD balance at the webshop's gateway. Assuming both gateways are issuing balances that are liquid, a low-cost path should be found and the exchange takes place. Now, Alice's gateway owes her less, the webshop's gateway owes it more, and the webshop considers Alice to have paid them.
This was informative but I'm still confused. Ignoring the trust issues for a moment, can you clarify the following:
1. Does Alice's Gateway maintain a balance in Yen, XRP's, or could it be either once her deposit is made?
2. I'm gathering from the fact that you have both pathfinding and matchmaking as part of the system that it's possible to have Gateways that just do conversions and are just a link in the pathfinding chain, yes?
If I understand correctly, the proper analogy might be the equivalent of a currency bazaar where a large number of vendors(Gateways) offer currency conversion, currency storage, currency pathfinding, or all of these -- for a fee of course. The advantage of Ripple is that it theoretically creates a highly competitive market -- assuming it's not coopted -- where routing is optimized to create the lowest possible transaction cost from point to point. I'm not saying that I think this would work in practice mind you, but is that the basic idea at least?
Next, is it possible to store funds in XRP's or are they simply transaction tokens with a fee attached?
Also, it seems that the business model for OpenCoin currently depends on the value of XRP's -- which I currently understand to be the cost to process a transaction. So, the equilibrium point for OpenCoin will be transaction price vs transaction volume in terms of its ability to sell out it's coins over time -- which is basically a variable annuity if I'm following this through. I'm also ignoring the idea that there is a fee to be a Gateway -- but hey the credit card companies charge terminal fees on top of transaction fees so it's certainly viable.
Thanks for any answers you can offer up and thanks for continuing to respond in the face of massive snarkiness.