Quote from: matthewh3 on February 27, 2013, 07:00:55 PM

Quote from: alexkravets on February 27, 2013, 06:37:19 PM

Quote from: duckbillp on February 27, 2013, 12:39:11 PM

Quote from: alexkravets on February 27, 2013, 10:13:44 AM

At the moment the ripple network has a lot of isolated disconnected nodes. It's not enough to distribute initial XRPs, one must also ensure enough incentive for people to connect to each other and to establish at least minimal lines of trust in their local currencies or BTCs.

Why not do a cascading distribution where people get an initial allocation for simply signing up, solving a CAPTCHA and verifying their email by clicking on a link and then they would get additional bonuses over time for connecting out to friends and family ?

For one thing, this would allow people to sign up for as many accounts as they can create email addresses, and receive XRP for each of them. Second, connecting (extending trust) to friends and family is not necessarily desirable, and it shouldn't be encouraged unless you have a good reason to do it.

Simply requiring aged gmail or yahoo accounts helps prevent multi account sign ups, similar to how only aged bitcointalk.org accounts receive the giveaways. Gmail had referrals by friends in its beta early access period, same can be done for ripple accounts, this would just create some scarcity for them at first. Encouraging connectivity in the long run is desirable to create viable paths in the network, for now that maybe deferred.

This would take away the anonymity that Ripple offers. They are trying to sell Ripple on its privacy enabling features similar to that which bitcoin can offer. I know most people don't care about their online privacy but bitcoiners tend to do so more than the average person when it come to tx's.

OpenCoin Inc or the ripple network itself would not need to retain those aged email addresses but only to use the roundtrip verification to one as sufficient proof to create and pre-fund an account.