Topic: You guys gonna become paranoid about Ripple - page 6. (Read 18652 times)

Apparently plenty.

The thing about paranoia is under it's influence you can't think straight, just compare the type of answers from the beginning of the thread to how they are now, I notice a big discrepancy.
If I am right there will be an XRP bubble / BTC crunch next, it was the same thing with LTC... ironically fuelled by the paranoia.

Aint nobody got time for Ripple

Now that, is a sensible argument against Ripple.  /thumbsup

After going through this thread (and reading many of the other Ripple threads), something I get is this:

The pro Ripple people seem to get Ripple.
The BTC people don't seem to get Ripple.

Now, the second thing is alarming, because a lot of BTC people are very very computer literate if not IT guys. I am a bit alarmed at how Ripple is going to work with regular people in light of this. This point alone puts up my "Danger Danger" alarm and I think rightfully so. The burden of proof is on the Ripple guys and thus far I just don't see the proof.

I would say Ripple probably needs to make a lot of its functionality transparent to the end user. As of now it seems that isn't the case.

Personally, I don't like the sound of mixing "IOU's" with BTC. That just seems extremely dangerous and counterproductive.

I do see some of the point of Ripple but am not enamored by any of it at this time. A more simplified decentralized exchange seems to be in order. NOT controlled by a company.

Its about sharing.

December 25th 2012...bravo ElectricMucus.  Prophesy fulfilled.  Big time!     Although I think we passed paranoid quite awhile ago.  Now it's just sheer terror, masked by half-truths and lies.   

Haven't read though the comments so apologies if this is just repeating what anyone already said, however I think of ripples as a trojan horse in crytocurrency.

This isn't paranoia as far as I'm aware these are fact....

Ripples provides a method where people will hold IOUs representing bitcoins instead of bitcoins, whilst mistakenly assuming they are holding bitcoins. This sets a very dangerous precedent and is very similar to the way gold was replaced by paper representations of gold over the centuries.

The lie is that ripples will somehow help the bitcoin economy and work with it. This is not true, ripple will attempt to replace bitcoins with a fake mirage of bitcoins.

Ripple also provides a centralised controlled network for trading debt where the quantity of units in circulation representing that debt XRP can be inflated at the whim of the controllers. Does this sound familiar? This is the way debt based money currently operates already, and which bitcoins is fighting against.

Ripple is a trojan horse because it will attempt to control and kill the power of free money like bitcoins which will be able to hold value. Bitcoins are not debt, they are an asset you can hold which is nobodies liability.

Another huge warning sign is that Ripple claims to be 'open' misleading people to assume it is open source software, this is not the case. the software is not open at all. 

Avoid ripples, do not support this debt based system.

I get a weird feeling in my gut that calling the organization opencoin and promising to open source/decentralize it increasingly with time was a way for some sinister force to manipulate big brains towards the dark side.

I hope it's just indigestion, though.

XRP can't and won't compete with bitcoin as a cryptocurrency, that's just ridiculous if you know how it's made and what it is meant for. People are just using it to speculate with, which I think is stupid but whatever speculators will use anything nowadays to pump up and then dump for profit. Bitcoin is probably too stable right now for speculators so they look for something else. Ripple itself could complement Bitcoin, I don't see it as a threat at all.

Humbly I say I don't understand where you're coming from so I think I am missing the context.
ATM what confession do you belong to? Ripple haters or Ripple converts?

Speaking of walls: there is a huge one at 10 million XRP for 50 XRP/USD in the XRPUSD orderbook. BitStamp stopped selling away XRPs at that price around the time that wall was touched last Friday.
I believe the Ripple Masters (Jed & co) want the XRP price to stay there for a while. Either that or they have decided to collect 200k USD for OpenCoin's pocket expenses.

Also I noticed in Ripple that the XRPUSD volume and depth are growing faster than the XRPBTC ones.
Dunno if that's an application of the bigger fool theory. But yes the herd thinks of XRPs like another altcoin. IMHO because it is. And part of the mass doesn't care it's premined. Metaphorically speaking I bet it's those people that e.g. would choose dictatorship over democracy in exchange for a false sense of security. If it works for them and if Jed proves to be a benevolent dictator then happy days.

Methinks: since the spreads in XRPBTC are way larger than in XRPUSD, that is an opportunity for someone to write arbitrator bots and increase their BTC count or XRP count for free depending on which confession they choose to belong to.

Shameless self bump, I'm seeing it pop up in every discussion, meanwhile the FUD machine is in high gear, steering into a brick wall (end of beta)

How many Bitcoins have the ripplescam.org guys already payed?

Just like frequent flier miles are handed out by an airline, prepaid minutes are owned by a phone company, or stamps are "pre-mined" by the post office. You're free to use it as currency, but keep in mind that they're basically just future transaction fees (the number of transactions one XRP pays for isn't 100% certain either, since it depends on load).
They are trying to make as much money as you're willing to pay for the convenience of using the system, while at the same time not killing it by over-pricing their services.
It's still in beta. It took many years before my PGP web of trust expanded to be useful enough that I could communicate securely without having to do a precursory key exchange. It was still something that I learned from and that I could write credit-giving essays and papers about.

Ripple's main challenge is to get a critical mass of gateways and IOUs going, as well as overcoming legal issues. The basic protocol itself appears sound, though there might be bugs hiding in the source code, so look forward to that getting released.

XRP shares some features with Bitcoin though, as well as other stocks and commodities, and one of those is that if you believe that Ripple is going up, feel free to invest, but that if public adoption fails, be prepared for a crash to near zero value.

You aren't talking about ripple, though. You are not required to trust an anonymous friend of anyone else's friend. You aren't required to trust ANY anonymous friend. Heck, you aren't required to trust anyone. But if you do decide to trust people, you are only trusting those you immediately decide to trust - and sure, by proxy, you are including every single person in the ripple network, but the trust of the friend includes trust that that friend will also limit his/her liability in an intelligent way. If you don't know people who are trustworthy, then simply do not participate. But you do not have to trust an anonymous friend of a friend, and certainly trusting even an anonymous friend is a bad idea by most folks' standards.

Lowest hypothetical risk - Not using ripple at all, not trusting anyone
Medium hypothetical risk - trusting a very small amount of money with several close friends.
Highest hypothetical risk - trusting a very large amount of money with a bunch of random anons behind tor.

And people might say "Well I don't want to take ANY risk!" So why are you invested in Bitcoin? There is a risk with everything. So then we must ask what is the benefit. For the example given above - someone transfering their paycheck to BTC sending to egypt and converting to EGP - obviously ripple gives no benefit in that scenario, so the person who posted that obviously has performed a risk/benefit analysis and determined that he should probably not risk trusting any friends in Ripple as no benefit will come of it.
However, what if in a different scenario, someone is greatly benefited by Ripple and therefore it is worth the small risk of a small amount of $$ "risked" with a few closed friends to gain access to the network? So what if someone has gold and wants to transfer it to someone in Siberia who only accepts Canadian Tire money or whatever? Easier with Ripple than with Bitcoin. Ripple was expressly designed for transactions like that. Note that Ripple is hypothetically not the only option for transactions like this in the future - someone can easily frankenstein the concept and release it "the rite way" i.e. not premining coins, being dodgy about its purpose or XRP's role as a currency, etc etc etc. Basically not doing everything possible to make bitcoiners shout "scam" while also aggressively courting bitcoiners. What was up with that? It's like they can't decide whether they want to attract us or drive us away.

Sounds like playing hot potato to me.

Trusting a friend for $20 on ripple is giving them a signed blank check that says "not to exceed $20" on it.

Now, your friend can't go into the grocery store and sign over a 3rd party personal check for groceries, it would be rejected. He can write his own iou/check for groceries however. The grocery store will come after your friend if the check bounces, not you.

Ripple is a system to transfer debt.

I can verify Joe/MtGox, but I absolutely cannot thrust an anonymous friend of your friend.

Better said than I ever did, bro, this is essentially my view ATM. The concept is all fine and dandy, but in the real world people always tend to abuse such a system, you will find out the very trustworthy counterparty you are borrowing to is overleveraged to the brink of collapse, because, well, other people found him trustworthy as well. And Ripple is not helping here by trying to do what Wall Street has tried to do for years but failed: simplifying and evaluating the counterparty risk as a single number. I am not saying that the software creators should be responsible for these things, but I strongly dislike the philosophy that software should ever try to be helpful in the very complex human business of risk assessment, all the algorithms created by the quants are neutral after all.

As for the poor Indian friend: it's said somewhere in the Ripple webpages that in the old system banks only evaluate the risk with quantifiable terms like income, while disregarding important things for human like love and trust, etc, well in this spirit I guess I should not treat my poor and wealthy friends purely based on their financial conditions, otherwise why not just use banks as they are, at least theoretically, more professional in risk assessment?

You seem to miss the point that there is a cap on each link in the social trust network, or maybe I misunderstand you. Poor friend in India who makes 10$ per month? Cap trust at 5$. Elite friend who drives porshe? 10k. That way it would take a thousand poor friends back home to saturate your one link to the elite, an unrealistic scenario.

But still, I understand and agree with what you are saying. You, being responsible with your own money without even doing any actions after building a web of trust, sounds a little strange. After all, hawala, which this thing tries to be, besides trust also involves severe punishment if this trust is broken. A part that is completely missing from this protocol

First, Bitcoin is llike a cutting knife, it enables you to do many things, including killing, but I don't think anyone would say owning a cutting knife is problematic because it could be used to kill. While Ripple's IOU system is just like a gun, which is clearly designed and manufactured for one single purpose.

Second, I was talking about how Ripple's IOU network could possibly cripple due to abuses, which is probably not a problem bitcoin has to face, as it doesn't have to rely on anyone's trust to work.

Bitcoin has exactly the same problems. Bitcoin makes it easy to lend money to anonymous people over the internet, without access to any of the social or legal protections that come with transacting face-to-face. That's why this forum will shout "SCAM" at every shadow: they've been burned before.