Topic: You guys gonna become paranoid about Ripple - page 7. (Read 18652 times)

That's essentially why I believe a software should not try to be helpful here, it's a completely human issue, a person should always take any lending activities seriously, come to know the person and talk to him/her, especially if it's someone you don't personally know. In fact, try to assess the counterparty risk of some unknown entities is just what all those MIT Ph.D quants in the Wall Street have been trying to do for years yet completely screwed up, and you guys maybe bringing more variables into a already complex formula.

Without Ripple's convenience people have been unable to curb their urges to lend/borrow(or you could call it invest) irresponsibly, which creates the recession we are now in, I doubt with Ripple it could be even better. If an abuser screws up hugely and leaves the network with a huge web of debts, it seems to me hardly any new capital would risk to get into it again. Bitcoin on the other hand doesn't have to face such problems.

Remember as a startup you have to offer clear advantages over the established, if people should be left to figure out if you have anything clearly desirable, they most likely will choose to stay with the established.

I don't get it. Why? I don't want to deal with that. I'd have a large trust limit with my gateway and small, throwaway trust limits with my friends. Part of the point of Ripple is that you can use the liquidity of the network to always receive IOU's you trust, like ones from a reputable gateway. And I'd withdraw from my gateway periodically to keep that balance from getting too large. No reason to lose everything if your gateway or the Ripple network goes down.

Imagine having built up a small fortune in IOUs in ripple, assumedly you would have some pretty large trust limits to some other high profile entities.. If you were owed a lot by these other entities you would be forever paranoid that they might collapse.. always checking up on their operations.. and similarly, if they paid the debt to you and your large trust limit remains, you would also have to keep checking their reliability so there is no chance they borrow a crap load before bolting..

Sounds exhausting..

There is very little difference between giving somebody trust and giving somebody money directly. As soon as you trust me, I can deposit your money at Bitstamp and leave you holding my IOU's. Don't extend trust to people without reason.

I'm starting to think that the language of Ripple needs revamping. People think that "trusting" people is a good thing, something you're supposed to do. It's not. Don't do it. It means something to the system, and "something" is "you can take my money".

Thanks for clarification, but unfortunately this doesn't completely solve my problem, the said brilliant kid could set his threshold reasonably high, with the belief that his elite friends are gonna borrow from other elites, who could be trusted to pay back, yet have not anticipated his poor friends to borrow from him en masse out of coincidence/some other reasons(e.g., I find out I could borrow from wealthy people, good! My friend as a guarantor? Double good!). And our assumption is that all entities act out of goodwill, we have not touched the possible scenario of abuse yet.




I did not mean that it's not a good idea that you go ahead and create it, I just doubt it would be successful, cause you will have to offer a competitive advantage over the current system of trust to make it successful, but I could hardly see any such advantage offered by Ripple from the information I have gathered.

An important property of Ripple is that it is *impossible* (without an error) to end up losing more money than the sum of all the trust you choose to extend. You can't accumulate a mountain of defaulted debt unless you extend a mountain of trust to people. Conversely, if you extend somebody trust of 10 BTC, you are extending them the ability to take 10 BTC from you. Ripple doesn't magically make loaning money to people a good idea.

Edit: Also:

When you trust somebody, you are trusting them to honor their IOU's. Full stop. When a transaction ripples through several people, each of them is left holding some IOU's of the next person in line. Each person is responsible for honoring their own IOU's, independent of whatever else happens. If you refuse to honor your IOU until your friend honors his, that's reneging on the agreement.

In my opinion, the trust system in Ripple doesn't mesh well with most people's expectations about social credit.

Let me show you another case:

A brilliant Chinese/Indian guy excels academically ever since he is a child, and goes all the way to graduate from a prestigious American university, then finds a job in a big investment bank, and starts hanging out with all kinds of wealthy elites.

One day, his poor relatives/old buddies suddenly find out that they could borrow massive amount of credits, all thanks to this brilliant kid's social network, and they immediately start borrowing with joy, then this poor kid wakes up to see himself accumulating a mountain of IOUs, all simply because he hasn't properly configured his Ripple client, you could hardly say it's his fault, it's very hard for anyone to foresee such a thing. Well aware of his old  chaps' payback abilities, he figures that he has made enough in the America to live a comfortable life in his home nation,  and most likely the court there would not hold him responsible for such things, it's better to leave this nation immediately than being chased around by his elite friends ever since, so he books a ticket immediately and leaves the nation, leaving his American friends to f**k themselves.

Now of course, you could argue his American friends should not have trusted him so much, but what if, let's say, there are one or two more additional intermediaries in between? Things will get a lot more unpredictable.

The moral of this story is, when you deal with an exchange, you are always expected to willingly enter into contract with another entity, while using a P2P network to propagate debts/credits will very likely get some innocent people caught in a pile of debts, hardly with their knowledge.

Let's look at a case: Egyptian dude working in Hong Kong want to send money to his loved ones back in Egypt every month.

• With bitcoin: Dude uses a China-based currency exchange. Wires his HKD from the paycheck to that exchange, withdraws bitcoin. Sends bitcoins to his wife in Egypt. She uses maybe some dude she found on localbitcoins.com to sell the bitcoins for local fiat currency EGP.
• With ripple: Dude uses a China-based ripple gateway. Wires his HKD from the paycheck to that gateway, withdraws HKD to his ripple wallet. Sends EGP (implicit currency conversion) to his wife in Egypt. Wife in Egypt uses "Alexandria ripple gateway" to redeem her EGP to paper notes.

I don't see the difference in required trust.

It's not an assumption, we should take it at its face value unless proven(nobody cares to do I guess) otherwise.

And you could be right about his motives, but unlike proudhon's trolls, he used some serious amount of left-brain power to come up with some very scientific-sounding bearish arguments, his bear post thread is one example, although I have noticed from time to time he has (maybe) willfully neglected evidences people confronted him with. My guess is that he may wanted to talk the price down, but loathed to use the kind of tactics other bears employed.

Huh? That's where he comes from? Hmmm, that may explain everything....

OP, your sig is not what 'Schroedinger's Cat' means

I am going back to being a lurker on this topic, if I hear something positive to overcome all of the negative I might come back. This is just too frustrating to understand and I have decided that it is not worth pursuing.

What I understand which has made me give up:

• Ripples are pre-mined and possessed by a central company
• Seems like someone is trying to make money off me
• I received no roi on my hours of research and I am cranky

You can make it seem like a complex comparison but it is not.  NOTHING is ZERO risk.  Not even the USD that most people buy BTC or settle Ripple with.  And the magnitude of the damage if USD fails is a lot bigger then bitcoin failing. 

For our purposes, the risk of using Bitcoin is pretty low.  99.999% of the time or more the payment will go through.  I do not think the odds of getting paid back in ripple are nearly as high. 

Sent.

Generosity all gone.

If anyone wants more, go ask at ripple.com/forum

Hmmm....

Edit: rBSA2TQR8L5yvm54GFQoJMjyHwANi8VbTi

I won't trust it with much until I see some code.

Currently it's fully centralized and closed source, so you have to use the ripple.com web client. OpenCoin says they will open it "soon".

I don't even know where to find the code to build it and run it so I don't have an address.  Point me to where I can get started and then maybe I'll let you prove how irrelevant they are. 

Were you talking to me too?

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I have zero at this time and would like to try them out.

The distribution of XRP is certainly an interesting problem, I look forward to seeing how OpenCoin and the devs choose to distribute them freely once they are out of Beta testing.

I'm feeling generous, post your address and i'll send ya some.

Can I have some?  I don't have any and have no clue how to get them.

They are only irrelevant if you have plenty.