Quote from: Meni Rosenfeld on March 01, 2013, 08:58:47 AM

Do you really not see the difference between
1. 50% of the coins are in circulation, the other 50% will be distributed according to a fair, objective protocol; and
2. 50% of the coins are in circulation, the other 50% are held by a central authority to do with as they please?
Even with the unwarranted assumption that OpenCoin is noble, what about the security implications of a single party storing an amount of currency equal to the total in circulation by a single party that can be hacked?

I do see the difference and I describe it further down in my post.

Quote from: alexkravets on March 01, 2013, 08:07:49 AM

At that point various scalability issues in Bitcoin (TPS ceiling, blockchain size, etc) will be contrasted against scalability strengths of Ripple

Quote

What scalability strengths? Maybe I'm missing something but AFAIK each transaction in Ripple requires much more processing than in Bitcoin, hence it's less scalable. The ways to increase Bitcoin's scalability are already known - I'm sure such ways are possible for Ripple too but they're not as widely studied.

1. There is absolutely no observable convergence in endless discussions on increasing Bitcoin's max_blocksize over the years, assuming this convergence does not materialize ... Bitcoin will be limited to 7 TPS and tx fees will rise until small amounts are not sendable.

2. Bitcoin transactions can never be made secure without some confirmations by at least a few blocks, and block time gap variance is so high that two days ago I had to wait 65 minutes for a single block to come through.

3. Because block time is sacrosanct in Bitcoin, there is no feasible solution in sight for this, except perhaps for small transactions with some kind of "overlay" monitoring network ... but hey those small transactions will soon become too expensive as blocks fill up and fees rise.

None of the above affects Ripple design. It can (if dev promises are taken at face value) handle huge TPS volumes and consensus is achieved in 5 - 10 seconds. Also Ripple has superior ledger data structures ( https://ripple.com/wiki/Ledger_Format ).

What about multi-asset trading and self-issued webs of trust and IOUs ... all huge additional feature jumps that maybe implementable in Bitcoin using colored coins or Bitcoin's scripting (if / when it gets enabled ) but in reality ... none of that is likely due to 1. 2. & 3. above.

Cheers ...