Quote from: JoelKatz on April 14, 2013, 01:56:58 PM

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As I've detailed in other posts, even if you publish the source there's no way for the network to fork if people don't like your newest changes; you will maintain complete control of both your ledger and any alternate ledgers for the foreseeable future.

I hope not. We don't want that kind of control. It doesn't benefit us in any way and it will decrease adoption. Our financial interest is in seeing the value of XRP go up and the primary way for us to achieve that is broad adoption of Ripple as a payment system.

Think about Satoshi and Bitcoin. His financial interest was in seeing the value of his Bitcoins go up as much as possible. Do you think he would have done better had he retained strict control over Bitcoin or tried to suppress altcoins? Or do you think he realized that broad adoption was the key and that required decentralization. The originators of Ripple were all Bitcoin people. These are things we fully appreciate. (And think about it. Would we even try to build trust with such a fundamental lie when trust is clearly essential to growing the network?)

There's one critical difference: Satoshi held no more coins than he mined himself, while Opencoin holds all coins in existence. Please follow this train of thought and, tell me where I'm wrong:

- Ripple becomes highly successful enabling huge internet trade, people love it and Opencoin valuation grows into the billions, has it's own NASDAQ IPO etc.
- Opencoin still owns the majority of coins in existence and plans to sell them for decades to come
- The US government/congress is concerned about the anonymity features of Ripple and asks Opencoin to backdoor it to make tracking easy, or face repercussion
- Since you can't make money as a US company by ignoring the law, the only way to realize your investment and sell the coins on the long run is to comply with the US demands; your board of directors will cave and if not the stockholders will force them
- There is an outcry in the community, people fork your public source and vouch not to upgrade to your trojanized version; a forked chain emerges that doesn't do tracking, in parallel with the official chain
- Since you are either the owner or the grandfather of all coins in existence, the forked chain has no idea what are the coins you still hold and what coins you have given away/sold in the past, thus the forkers can't purge your control form their chain
- You will therefore end-up holding the majority of coins in the alternate chain too and there's no way to prevent it, except the trivial case where you still keep the bulk of the funds in an easy identifiable private key
- You institute a free for all in the alternate chain (it doesn't cost you anything) and crash it's value, therefore killing it, or at least vaporizing 99% of the duplicated wealth there, so that it makes no sense for anyone to switch to it

Quote from: herzmeister on April 14, 2013, 12:05:47 PM

The way I understand it, the important difference and reason why Ripple does not need proof of work is because it has something reminiscent of actual accounts. JoelKatz compares Ripple's method of finding consensus with how people in a room would come to consensus. That's only possible because you know what people are, what a person actually is (as opposed to within the Bitcoin system).

You should not confuse ripple accounts holding the money with actual servers running the consensus algorithm. So you don't have to trust anyone to use XRP, except maybe the server you connect to if you have a thin client. When running a verifier node (for example a ripple gateway or large merchant), you need to carefully chose your peers so as to have a global and uncorrupted view of the network. Verifiers essentially form a darknet; you can freely connect as in a "whitenet", but you can't participate in consensus.

It's an intriguing idea that needs to be formally explored, but I can't fault it for the time being. I cannot but wonder if convergence is possible after a network split; in Bitcoin the most powerfull subnetwork will force it's world view, while here all subnets will have 100% consensus and it's not clear how the local views can be reconciled to form a global view.