Topic: Why Ripple™ is against everything Bitcoin - page 30. (Read 45589 times)

You should read my last sentence, I do not worry about Opencoin manipulating the XRP market. What I worry about is some other organizations(like a botnet for example) creating a Ripple clone(if they release the source code then why not), and tries to outdo Ripple(by both manipulating their own currency and working honestly), all because they want the currency they create in the XRP way to appreciate, like what Jed openly admitted. And since they are a botnet, they can create thousands of validating nodes and ask them to be all cooperative and helpful when it comes to validating the transactions and run it like a good network, after all, it's Ripple's goal to make the validations costless, right?

Whether Ripple will  become a good model for a payment network remains to be seen, what I am convinced however, is that XRP is a bad investment.

OK, the predictable rate of BTC production vs the unpredictable release of XRP could be an advantage. The total number of both is fixed however. And if OpenCoin controls the release, they are also in a position to stabilise the exchange rate, which has clearly been a problem for BTC, so it's not universally disadvantageous for them to have this power. Then again, there are no guarantees they will actually do this. Maybe they could release a script that verifiably stabilises the USD/XRP exchange rate to within certain limits on daily, weekly and monthly swings until its XRP supply runs out?

With mining, the rate of generation of bitcoins is provable mathematically, and the resistance to pump and dump is strong.

Think about this: can you pump and dump Bitcoin without anyone knowing? It's theoretically possible but very hard to do, especially during its initial stage. The total supply is fixed mathematically(provable), and the distribution of the supply can be changed by anyone who wants to mine,  and the ownership is, again, mathematically provable. As long as there are enough innocent participants mining, the price will be determined by the free market as no single entity controls the supply.

So let's get to XRP, can you know how many XRPs are in circulation? Probably not. Can you know how XRPs are allocated by Opencoin? No. Let's quote Joel Katz here:


original link: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8519/how-long-will-it-take-for-opencoin-to-distribute-the-50-billion-xrps

So gentlemen, there is no guarantee that Opencoin could not just saturate the market with shills and limiting the supply to honest participants. How can it be easier to just tell a user asking for giveaways that there are 10,000 people in front of you in the queue, and your best option is just to buy XRPs somewhere? And how much does it cost to tell your shills just to create hundreds of sockpuppets and play the trick of "moving money from left hand to right" and create the false appearance that price goes up due to the demand? OK, let me make it clear, I may sound like a crazy paranoid but I am not doubting the integrity of Ripple developers and Opencoin here, but trying to demonstrate how vulnerable a honest investor in XRP can possibly be in the worst case scenario under the kind of secretive approach they are taking. Especially consider that there is nothing stopping a malicious organization from cloning the Ripple network and create a XRP competitor which they can manipulate to a considerably high price without even being discovered. If that happens what would happen to the XRP's value is anybody's guess.

Technically it's not a fatal flaw, but if the consensus mechanism turns out to work just as well (not a given), then that could be an advantage for Ripple. It is conceivable (but by no means certain) that this could turn out to be a fatal flaw in the competition between Ripple and Bitcoin.

Ripple is what happens when a turd drops in a toilet.

I think that image ^ explains what ripple really is. 

This is what I can't overlook, and therefore I can't take the rest of the content in your posts seriously.

Mining is a brilliant solution for controlled currency issuance. The tapering geometric progression in the block reward and encryption of block headers with the Merkle root of a current transaction set is also brilliant. As a package Bitcoin is doing so well that difficulty is now 10 million, an extraordinary value to reach in just 4.5 years. The only time mining was unprofitable was in 2009 when Satoshi kept the faith and Bitcoin alive until wider participation really kicked off in 2010.  It has not looked back since.

Block verification by mining nodes is massively reduced by using pools.

If you think mining will taper off then you cannot deny that difficulty will have to fall. But there is no sign of this happening. Difficulty could only fall if the fx rate fell to catastrophic lows. The fall from $266 to $50 had a negligible effect on the next difficulty (probably even if it were sustained, not brief).

The fees market for block space is comatose because it is dwarfed by the block reward, however, once blocks average 20 MB each then the fees market will start working properly. By the time blocks are 100+ MB the block reward will be a sideshow. Why would most/all people stop mining when a solved block could yield the equivalent of $100,000?  Answer: they will keep mining.

If you are worried about electricity costs then ASICs use less electricity per hash than the prior technologies. A future generation of ASICs could be made with reversible gates which means that electricity use will be negligible and fans obsolete. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/CLASS_VHDL_99/tran888/lecture003-reversible-logic.pdf
"Power dissipation of reversible circuit, under ideal physical circumstances, is zero."

Bitcoin in a nutshell:

Yes not sure what you mean by "fair" as their entire business plan is based on the appreciation in value of XRP.   That is why I decided to speculate in XRP because the company's interest are aligned with mine for a change.  It has worked out very well so far for myself and I assume for them as well.

It's an important difference, but I see IOUs issued by gateways mainly as a temporary tool for the transition to crypto. Once Ripple was widely used, XRP could be used for everything and you wouldn't need IOUs anymore, except perhaps for exchange with other crypto-currencies. I don't think there is a fundamental reason something similar couldn't be done with Bitcoin. In any event, Ripple would give us exactly what Bitcoin needs right now: an efficient, distributed mechanism for exchanging between fiat and BTC.

Mining is exactly why Bitcoin is not a Ponzi scheme. Mining provides a way for the investors/buyers to pay for the running of the network, and an incentive for the miners to further secure the payment network.

Besides, mining is how Bitcoin can prevent double-spending and remain decentralized-a probabilistic(rather than commander-and-lieutenant) solution to the Byzantine Generals problem.

That's true, it is a problem, but it also provides fair distribution that is pretty safe from exploitation.  OpenCoin are struggling to find a fair way to distribute XRP without mining.

Also sprach Zarathustra.....

Yes, primates take note: The civilized human is the enslaved, collectivised, governed human: the citizen, a cartoon of the human.

Bitcoin mining is the problem with Bitcoin.

I must have missed that one at first, glad I got it now. Thanks!

I think had Ripple not kept an insane amount of XRP for themselves and had found a way to fairly distribute XRP like bitcoin mining does then I would say Ripple does everything Bitcoin does and more.

But Because of this I won't ever rely on XRP to store wealth, at least not for 10-20 years until they are evenly disbursed and opencoin have spent most of their stash.

So bitcoin is still the winner in that sense.  And given it only costs like $1 or less in XRP to start benefitting from the Ripple system right now, why not embrace both.  You don't need to care about XRP to start using Ripple.

ripple irritates me

OK, so we agree that BTC doesn't scale well and that Ripple is offering a solution for that -- pluses and minuses aside. I can also see that a great deal of work needs to be done to move BTC from its current state to a real interoperable electronic payments system -- and your comment about the parallel Universe seems right from what little I've gleaned. Tracking debt, bills, complex financial instruments (you mean derivatives?), etc... seems more like a nice to have rather than a real problem that needs to be solved right now. From what little I know about the 51% attack technique, the primary intent is to kill the system -- as there are easier ways to make money and it sounds like it could work. That's really unfortunate for BTC as the protocol isn't really bullet proof then. In effect, I'd rather have inflation wound me financially than the 51% attack kill me.

I can see that Ripple is certainly one way to go to try to solve these problems. Time for me to take a break and ponder the data for awhile. I really appreciate everyone's comments and willingness to help a new person like myself come some part of the way up to speed.

Thanks.

It seems the answer is yes. Jed himself when asked how OpenCoin plans to raise revenue answered "we hold XRP and hope they go up in value."

The OP talks about trademark, a further possibility could be patents, random speculation.

I am neutral about Ripple and taking a wait-and-see attitude, there are good arguments both pro and con whether the system will actually work as marketed.  As part of my research, I have a question which hopefully someone here can answer:


What is the sustaining business model for OpenCoin on which this investment was predicated?  Or did these firms simply receive a large chunk of XRP with the assumption that the value will appreciate?  Basically I'm trying to understand how investing in OpenCoin was pitched, and what the VC exit strategy is going to be.  These guys would not have handed over money without the expectation of a 10x or 100x rate of return.

Given that OpenCoin doesn't take a cut on transactions, and that once the source code is released and cloneable the technology stops being a scarce resource, is OpenCoin planning to offer additional/ongoing/proprietary paid-for services and products, or is the entire monetization strategy based on widespread network adoption and a rising XRP value?