Topic: WTF happened to ripple? - page 4. (Read 21828 times)

It qualifies as peer-to-peer in my book as long as you've got enough people to run server nodes so it couldn't be shut down.

Sort of like tor I think.

Also, wasn't bitcoin intended to move toward light client for users as well?

You're right. The clients are not peers since they don't provide services to anything and so, to be precise, Ripple should not be described as a P2P network unless you mean the relationship among servers. B2B's not really right either -- if you mean the servers, they are P2P. If you mean the clients, they're not B2B. There may not be any perfect term to describe it. I still think P2P is closest because it behaves just as if it would if it were "really" P2P except that adding a client doesn't add capacity. Some may consider that fundamental.

I guess this link gives me the answer I was looking for:
I'm certainly a fan of having things with different tradeoffs! But I don't think I'd call Ripple a "Bitcoin like" payment system— it seems to have inherited some of Bitcoin's scaling weaknesses, but not its fundamental purpose or strengths (strong decentralization). The places where it is similar seem to be fairly superficial (use of ECDSA and base58 encoded 160 bit addresses).  Maybe I'm entirely missing what is actually bitcoin like about it. ... but not being Bitcoin like is a good thing, ... failing to be obviously and assuredly decentralized, however, makes me skeptical of its future.

It's an argument implicitly being made in many of the threads on the forum here where people are offering increasingly large prices for XRP.

I think most of your complaints are legitimate. Every system reflects tradeoffs and Ripple is not trying to be all things to all people. But I have to disagree with this part:

The point is to allow people to transact in fiat currencies much the same way they transact in Bitcoins. Bitcoin is a currency with a built in payment system for that currency. Ripple is a Bitcoin-like payment system for any currency. "Ripple isn't a good currency" is a great rebuttal to an argument nobody's making.

I agree that a non-public ripple implementation like the two phase design could be more efficient in many cases, and it would be also more private.
That design had a "register" server as a commit method (a server that just timestamps the commit id) or a blockchain commit method. It could be a ledger commit method.
The main disadvantage of this approach is that it requires all intermediaries in a transaction to be online, pushing for centralized mail-like servers.
But I'm sure a system like that will eventually appear, and I think it can be combined with a chain/ledger type of ripple system.
Colored coins can implement the ripple concept on the bitcoin blockchain too.
So whether this new consensus system works or not, Ripple will be there, and I'm very happy about it.

But if the system works, it seems it will be more efficient than bitcoin, precisely for not having mining.
And the system NEEDS a scarce token to be secure, they had to create xrp, just like a ripplecoin would have needed its own hostcoin.

But now we realize that mining was a solution for two problems: security and issuing.

When we were asked "Isn't mining wasteful", we used to argue "No, it's the cost of security, cheaper than other monetary systems".

But if opencoin issued the initial supply through a free software program to submit proof of work, and they we're asked...

-Isn't this wasteful ?
-No, it's p2p issuance.

Would that make sense for the average person who can't even mine ? I don't think so.

What this means to me is that the issuance problem wasn't really solved in the first place. That's why we want to try a different approach with Freicoin, taking it as an opportunity to attract attention and reputation to the currency, let's see what happens.
And although I'm concerned about what they're going to do with xrp, I'm glad is not giving it to miners they don't need as Ben Lauri proposed for his mining-less minettes (which by the way I'm not sure what relation it has with this new ripple system).
If they distribute them badly and xrp become somehow unacceptable, just fork and try again.
I'm very excited about the technical improvements this new chain can bring us besides mining-less p2p accounting. They told me they're using Content-addressable storage, which seems ideal for this public accounting use case.

The current Ripple is maybe better referred to as a B2B network than a P2P network, since really it is not intended that ordinary people will run an actual node (server).

-MarkM-

I could be wrong of course, but the first answer to your question that comes to my mind is:

the same thing that happened to Chaum e-currency, RSA, and many other efforts (OK you named at least one):  mainly, greed of the founders drove the ideas down into irrelevancy. 

Lets see me proved wrong please   I liked what I saw at first too. 

The only _real_ examples where there would have been a scaling advantage were centralized networks run by Ryan (and maybe a handful of other servers).  I suppose you could call RipplePay and Villages proofs-of-concept with the possibility for a federation glued together by Bitcoins, but afaict nobody ever implemented anything like that.  It was just a series of vague proposals on the mailing list.  (And even if someone did implement that, they would run into the same centralization problems Diaspora has without any of the data control features.)

If you wanted to create a bonafide p2p Ripple without the use of a blockchain, how would you deal with nodes appearing and disappearing just as quickly as they do with Bittorrent?

I'm not saying that the new Ripple solves this-- I'm saying it's the next logical step in a system that feigns decentralization while it implements a centralized solution.  The current Ripple XRP system and (to a large extent) Freicoin are both _centralized_ approaches to digital currencies.  Whether its solving puzzles, downloading/verifying a blockchain, or maintaining the node list, why should the user do any work whatsoever without knowing the rules for how the rewards (or the bulk of the initial rewards) controlled by a single entity are to be divvied up?  This would be like if Bittorrent had started by encouraging hundreds of thousands of nodes to connect through a bunch of trackers, then at some point in the future having a single node with all the files people want start uploading to everyone else.  It's an absurd idea for bootstrapping a network-- or, more properly, it's a way of implementing a protocol without having addressed one of its core problems.

You can't claim to have designed the next generation of digital currency and punt on how to allocate your resources.  Of course I'm happy to be wrong if it turns out that, "just ask and we'll give you some," is the holy grail here.

They still show a trust system like this:

The system works because everyone along the path has vouched for the person just directly before him in the pathway. He accepts an IOU from her and then issues an IOU of his own for the same amount to the next person in the path who accepts his. His balance then zeroes out and the IOU has moved along one more link in the pathway.

The more people you trust and the more people trust you, the more pathways there will be for IOUs to travel. The more IOU pathways available, the more transactions become possible without a Ripple gateway.




Edit:
This looks great...

Built-in currency exchange
Currency exchange is built-in, allowing people to pay and receive in their preferred currency — including Bitcoin. So you can make payments in BTC even for things priced in fiat, or conversely, accrue BTC from payments made from payers using euros, yen, or dollars. In general, Ripple expands the Bitcoin marketplace.



...and this looks somewhat bad.   

A Gateway will typically:

    Accept fiat from a customer and credit their ripple account balance.
    Accept funds from a ripple account and send the customer fiat.
        Gateways should comply with the BSA, have AML policies and require KYC information.

The original idea for ripple was a credit network based on pairwise trust. The reliance of pairwise trust instead of global consensus gave it a significant scaling advantage compared to blockchain crypto-currencies: if you make a set of trades that can be settled entirely within your local community there would be no need to tell the whole world about them. It would have been possible to use ripple along side Bitcoin in order to get low cost high scale transactions denominated in Bitcoin— which you then periodically and automatically settled with actual Bitcoin.

The ripple system of today is very different: It is a blockchain global consensus system— like Bitcoin, with all the inherent scaling limits— which exchanges pre-mined coins.  It replaces the attack resistant decentralized POW consensus in Bitcoin with a something which is either dependent on centralized trust or, alternatively, is sibyl vulnerable (depending on how  UNL actually plays out— the system basically punts sybil resistance to the user, instead of being fundamentally sibyl resistant like POW systems; my expectation is that sybil resistance is too hard to punt to the user and the effect will that people will only trust a few big nodes— effectively making it a centralized system).

How did it go from a interesting and potentially worthwhile addition to the cryptocoin ecosystem to— what basically amounts to— "just another premined altcoin"? Frankly, the whole things sounds like something RealSolid would have come up with now.