Quote from: becoin on February 23, 2013, 08:48:11 AM

Quote from: OpenCoin on February 22, 2013, 11:09:58 PM

> Why do you think, say USD IOU issued by gateway A will always be in par with USD IOU issued by gateway B?

They won't always be on par, but if the gateways are doing their jobs, it should almost always be very close. Every failure is a profit opportunity.

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So I can't transfer 10 ripple USD issued by gateway A to a merchant that is pricing their products in ripple USD issued by gateway B without exchanging them first? That will lead to doubling the fees for every transfer. 1 XRP for the exchange and 1 XRP for the actual transfer?

Yes but no. A payment will take from offers if that's the best payment path. When making a Ripple payment, this is the typical payment mechanism:

1) The client gets the destination account and destination currency from some source. ("Pay Jeff 50 Bitcoins.")

2) The client looks at what the user holds and picks one or more source currencies to use.

3) The client asks the server what its options are. The server forms payment paths using the various possible source currencies taking into account what the destination will accept. These payment paths can ripple through accounts that hold and accept multiple IOUs but also offers. No transactions have been performed yet, so this is all free.

4) The client tells the user something like "You can make this payment for 50.03 bitcoins or 125 USD."

5) The user picks a source currency.

6) The client assembles one final transaction, incurring one fee. The transaction can include multiple paths (so long as they use the same source currency). The transaction can include a "maximum to spend" and the transaction will fail if it would cost more than that.

7) The client submits the transaction. The servers process it. The transaction is accepted. (The servers will take incrementally from more than one path of the paths explicitly specified in the transaction to get the best result.)

Notice that only one transaction is needed, even if you ripple through multiple accounts, take from multiple offers, and so on. The one and only transaction is basically "get Jeff 50 bitcoins he'll accept and don't charge me more than 50.03 Bitcoins to do it."

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If there are 1 million gateways issuing ripple USD how many currency pairs will we have in ripple USD being both base and counter currency? There are also euros, pounds, yen, franks etc. This will be speculator's heaven and a price chaos?!

Possibly. But I don't see why that will be bad. Since there will be many possible paths for the same transaction, costs should typically be low. We'll see.